No. 5 — The shaving courtesan
In Tatsumi Pass in Ketaka District, a fox, a shape-shifting fox, lived and enchanted people, shaving off their heads, and troubled the villagers. At a drinking party at the village headman's house, two young men who had been boasting of their strength took on the task of hunting it down, and when they went to the pass, they saw the fox transformed into a young woman, picking up a Jizo, a stone bodhisattva statue, and raising it as a baby. They told the elderly couple of the house its true nature, but were not believed. Even when they boiled the baby in a cauldron, it cried out, and the two were suspected, and the angry grandfather was about to hand them over to the magistrate's office, but a passing priest intervened and had them forcibly ordained as monks. After the sutra chanting, when they came to their senses, the priest and the temple had vanished without a trace, and they found themselves standing in a grassy field, their heads shaved bald.
- Land
- Inaba and Hoki
- 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.