No. 59 — The bottle gourd gentleman

Record

A priest dressed the bottle gourd from next door in a woman's mask and a long-sleeved kimono, set it in his room, and night after night played the shamisen and amused himself with it. A young temple boy, growing suspicious, struck the bottle gourd in the closet and discovered what it truly was, then hid a chestnut burr in a hole in its hem. The priest, not knowing this, tried to use it and flew into a rage, but as he chased the fleeing boy he thought better of it and lay down to sleep together with him.

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.