No. 13 — The white hare of Inaba

The spiteful elder brother gods of Okuninushi, a god of the land, were on their way to Inaba to court Princess Yakami when, near Utsumi village, Keta District, they met a hare, hairless and naked. The hare wept, saying it had quarreled with a wani, a creature of the sea, and had its skin stripped off, but the brother gods, in jest, told it a lie: that its fur would grow back if it soaked in seawater and let the wind blow upon it. The hare did just as they said, but instead its whole body ached, and it writhed in pain.

Source: Inpaku Shiwakai (ed.), Inpaku Mukashibanashi (1911) — National Diet Library Digital Collections (Japanese text)
Land: Inaba and Hoki
Type: Shape-Shifting Animals, Strange Fates
Beings: white hare, wani, Okuninushi

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.