No. 3 — Kota of Koga

Record

Kota of Koga went out to shoot ducks on the Kitakami River, but he thought that rather than shoot them with a gun, he would dive into the river and catch them by hand, and he tucked the necks of the ducks he caught one after another into his loincloth. After he had tucked in a great many, the ducks all beat their wings at once and flew up into the sky, carrying Kota with them, and he was dropped onto the roof of the great Buddha hall in Nara, where he stood at a loss — and the text breaks off at that point.

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.