No. 45 — The otter and the fox

Record

A fox, a shape-shifting fox, hungry from the snow, got some fish from an otter. When the fox asked how fish were caught, the otter lied and told it that if it put its tail into a hole in the ice, fish would bite. When the fox did as it was told, its tail froze fast and would not come out, and when it was found by a person, it fled for its life.

Source

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

Land

Shiwa District

Type

Shape-Shifting Animals

Beings

fox, otter

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.