No. 74 — The wife who helps the todo next door

Record

The husband, trying to catch something in the house, ordered his wife to bring a kitchen knife. The wife secretly let the todo, who lived next door, escape, and instead had her husband hold a wooden pestle in place of the knife. The husband, believing the pestle to be the knife, tried to cut with it but could not, and when he realized what had happened, he beat his wife with the pestle.

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.