No. 57 — The old man's field tilling

Record

An old man tilling his field gave a portion of his rice cake to a rat. In gratitude, the parent rat closed the old man's eyes and led him to the palace of the rats, where he was given a feast and sent home with money as a gift. A greedy old man next door imitated this, but when he saw the rats pounding gold, he could not help mimicking the cry of a cat, and the rats fled. When he came to his senses, he found himself fallen in the middle of the field with his head stuck in a rat hole.

Source

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

Land

Shiwa District

Type

Shape-Shifting Animals, Strange Fates

Beings

rat

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.