No. 2 — The blowing-flower that bears gold

Record

A wife who passed gas by mistake before her lord was sent back to her home village, and there she gave birth to a boy. The child was raised and called a fatherless child, and he applied himself to his studies. He made a flower from colored paper and called it a blowing-flower that bears gold if held by one who never passes gas, and went to sell it to the lord. He first got the lord to say that there was no human being who never passed gas, and then he argued that it was unreasonable for his mother to have been blamed for the very same thing. The lord acknowledged him as his own child, called mother and son back to the palace, and favored them even more than before.

Source

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

Land

Shiwa District

Type

Strange Fates

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.