No. 11 — Nose-knowing
The husband noticed that whenever he was away, his wife invited the man from the house next door and fed him well. He pretended to go out, then hid on a beam in the stable, and as the two of them were pounding rice cakes he poked at them with a long pole and made them quarrel. As though he had just come back from town, he lied that he had learned the trick of "nose-knowing," and by naming hidden red-bean rice cakes and sake by smell alone he won a reputation for it, until he was asked to cure the illness of the daughter of a choja, a very rich man. At a signal fire he had arranged beforehand with his wife, he went to attend her, and through an oracle of the Aoso mountain gods he saw that a green snake on the roof and a toad under the floor were the cause of the illness. He cured the daughter and received money as a reward.
- Land
- Shiwa District
- Beings
- mountain gods
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.