No. 77 — The fox's Ubako-sama

The fox of Hodoshima, a shape-shifting fox, used leaves and pheasant feathers to turn into a beautiful girl called Ubako-sama, and entered the Chojayashiki, where it was welcomed as if it were the real daughter. Monjiya no Kichi saw through this and tried to warn the choja, a very rich man, but was caught by the fox's trick, and realized that he had only been peering into a horse's rear end.

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: fox

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.