No. 56 — The gold that belonged by birth

Record

A man was digging up a pine tree to use in his garden when he found a jar containing gold at its roots. He buried it again as it was and told his neighbor about it. The neighbor dug in the same place, took the gold home, and set it before the household shrine. But that night the gold flew back to the house where it had first been found, and the neighbor gave up, saying it had been fixed from birth to belong to its original owner.

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.