No. 14 — One little bean
A poor old couple found a single bean that rolled into a hole, and as they dug further they came upon Jizo, a stone bodhisattva statue. Jizo invited them up onto his knee, then his shoulder, then his head, and when they imitated a rooster's crow there, gamblers on the floor above mistook it for dawn and fled, leaving money behind, which made the old couple wealthy. The spiteful old woman next door heard of this and had her daughter do the same: the daughter climbed onto Jizo's head on her own and repeated the crowing, but the gamblers saw through it, and she came home bloodied after a terrible time.
- Land
- Shiwa District
- Beings
- Jizo
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.