No. 51 — Chohenko
The stepmother tried to make her own daughter Chahanko kill Chohenko, the child of the first wife, but Chahanko's kindness and quick thinking foiled the attempt twice. Losing patience, the stepmother paid a wicked man to cut off Chohenko's arms and have her abandoned in the mountains, but the wind blew the rope apart and the girl survived, and in time she became a girl at a teahouse and was chosen in marriage by a samurai. Through the stepmother's scheme of rewriting a letter, she was for a time driven out and pursued, but when she tried to save her child at a spring, the power of a strange old woman made her arms whole again, and she was reunited with her husband, and the stepmother's wrongdoing came to light.
- Land
- Shiwa District
- Type
- Strange Fates
- Beings
- a strange old woman
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.