No. 15 — Uemontaro and Zaemontaro
Neighbors Uemontaro and Zaemontaro stayed one night in a mountain hut, when the mountain gods, gods of the mountains, came late and spoke of the sex of the child each of their wives would bear and the fortune each child would carry at birth (a girl would bring much fortune, a boy only a single hatchet); having overheard this, they made a marriage pact between their children just as had been foretold. Zaemontaro's descendants became wealthy, but a son who wished to sleep late in the morning shot the fuku-no-kami, a god of good fortune, who was on the roof, with a bow and arrow, and the family's fortune declined. The wife who was divorced was helped by a wolf, the mountain wolf once called o-inu, and gained the skill to tell people and beasts apart, and at the home of an old charcoal-burner she found a golden stone and a ravine where sake welled up, and so became wealthy. Her former husband, now fallen into poverty, began to frequent that sake shop, and at last the wife revealed her true self and made him serve as the shop's fire-tender for the rest of his life.
- Land
- Shiwa District
- Beings
- mountain gods, fuku-no-kami, wolf
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.