Tale 52 — The umaoidori and the omen of famine

Record

The umaoidori, the bird said to call the horses home, resembled a cuckoo. A servant in the household of a choja, a very rich man, let one horse out to pasture and lost sight of it, and after searching for it without end, became this bird, it was said. Its cry of "a-ho-" was the voice calling after the horse, and in some years, when it came to the village and cried, it was taken as an omen of famine.

Source

Yanagita Kunio, Tono Monogatari (1910) — Aozora Bunko (Japanese text)

Land

Tono

Type

Death, Ghosts and Omens, Shape-Shifting Animals, Origins of Plants and Animals

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.