No. 48 — Choiwakora

Record

Monjiya no Kichi, a lover of gambling, polished a pine burl and sold it to a priest, falsely claiming it was a fire-charm called Choiwakora, and convinced him by putting out a damp pile of straw with it. The priest, pleased, tried it at his own temple, but the fire would not go out, and in the end the temple burned to the ground.

Source

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

Land

Shiwa District

Type

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.