No. 11 — The tale of Lake Tanega
A choja, a very rich man, of Miyashita village, Inaba Province hired a beautiful maidservant named Tane from Hosokawa village, who often brought back persimmons from somewhere and shared them with everyone. When a manservant followed her, Tane entered Yuyama village's Lake Tanega and swam, taking persimmons from an island; her true form was a snake, a serpent often a spirit in disguise, that dwelled in the lake. Once her true form was known, Tane disappeared, and afterward misfortune continued in the choja's house until it fell into ruin. Later an old woman, Mitsu, who enshrined the master of this lake, offered rice cakes every year and prayed, and during droughts she brought rain through prayer, conveying to people the divine power of the dragon maiden, a woman of the dragon kind.
- Land
- Inaba and Hoki
- Beings
- snake, dragon maiden
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.