No. 81 — The leak in the old house

Record

On a rainy night, an old man and his wife said that the leak in the old house was more frightening than a tiger from China, and a tiger hiding in the stable overheard them and, fearing the leak in the old house as something more frightening than itself, tried to run away. At the same time, a thief who had slipped in to steal money mistook the tiger for a horse and rode it, and the tiger, believing that the one riding on it was indeed the leak in the old house, ran off into a rocky cave still carrying the thief on its back.

Source

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

Land

Shiwa District

Type

Strange Fates

Beings

tiger

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.