No. 8 — Seventeen long yams

Record

A poor son-in-law had no gift to bring to the autumn mochi feast of the choja, a very rich man. He shot a duck at the river, and where he chased it, among the piers of a bridge, he dug up seventeen long yams, and fish too had gotten into the leggings he had taken off, making for an unexpected great haul. The son-in-law was praised for the lavish gift, and growing overconfident, he shot a pheasant in the middle of the night to boast of his feat, but he soiled the water basin, and when this came to light, his father-in-law divorced him.

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.