No. 13 — Nukafuku and Komefuku
The stepmother gave Nukanpuku, the child of the first wife, a straw bag with a broken bottom, while she gave Komenpuku, her own child, a sound bag, and sent them off to gather chestnuts, making the older sister walk ahead so as to be unkind to her. In the mountains Nukanpuku went after a rice ball she had dropped and came to a lone house where man-eating brothers lived, but a yamanba, an old woman of the mountains who eats people, hid the two of them in the folds of her skirt and sheltered them, mended Nukanpuku's bag, and at parting had them choose between a light wicker chest and a heavy one. In Nukanpuku's light chest was a beautiful robe, and in Komenpuku's heavy chest were bugs and snakes, a serpent, often a spirit in disguise. Afterward Nukanpuku secretly finished her work and went out, beautifully dressed, to see the kagura at the house of the choja, a very rich man, and kept her true self hidden all the while.
- Land
- Shiwa District
- Beings
- yamanba
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.