No. 55 — The master of the marsh of Onuma

Record

A man was asked, on the shore of Onuma, by the woman of the marsh, the spirit that rules a marsh, to deliver a letter to the man of Goronuma. On the way, the master of a teahouse secretly read its contents and found that it said to kill and eat him, so he rewrote it to ask for a hundred ryo of gold instead. The man received a hundred ryo of gold from the master of Goronuma just as it said, and split it with the teahouse master.

Source

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

Land

Shiwa District

Type

Yokai and the Uncanny, How Places Got Their Names

Beings

master of the marsh

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.