No. 24 — The calf choja

Record

On New Year's Eve, the father went out to shop, but instead of New Year goods he bought charcoal and came home with it, and his wife grew angry and went back to her parents' house. The father scattered the charcoal through the house and pretended to entertain guests, and afterward he noticed that the calf he kept had died. When he dug the ground to bury it, he found a jar filled with gold, and he became a choja, a very rich man.

Source

Ogasawara Kenkichi (ed.), Shiwa-gun Mukashibanashi-shu (1938) — National Diet Library Digital Collections (Japanese text)

Land

Shiwa District

Type

Taboos and Customs, Strange Fates

This is an English rendering of our short Japanese summary of the source tale — a summary translated from the Japanese, not a translation of the original text. The summary was drafted and translated with AI assistance, and names and numbers were checked against our records. Tale numbers for this book follow the order in which the tales appear; they are ours, not the book's.