No. 82 — The cloak and hat of hiding

Record

A sly child held a broken basket up to his face and talked to himself, saying he could see Edo and could see Osaka, and a tengu, a long-nosed mountain spirit, saw this, was astonished, and wanted the basket for himself. The child got the tengu to agree to an exchange for its cloak and hat of hiding, then hid himself and ran off, and used the cloak and hat of hiding to play pranks in the town, but his mother threw the cloak and hat away, which caused an uproar over a monster that was only half visible, and in the end he jumped into a river and returned to his original form.

Source

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

Land

Shiwa District

Type

Mountain Folk and Strangers, Strange Fates

Beings

tengu

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.