No. 47 — The mountain of abandoning old men

Record

It was the custom to abandon a parent on the mountain once he turned seventy-two, but the son was moved by his parent's love in breaking twigs along the way to mark the path home, and secretly hid him beneath the floor. A difficult problem set by the ruler was solved through the parent's wisdom, and when the son honestly told how it had been done, the wisdom of the old came to be valued, and from then on the custom of abandoning parents on the mountain ceased.

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.