No. 17 — Two bundles, four bundles
A blind zato, a blind itinerant musician, stayed the night when rice-harvest mochi was being pounded. The couple of the house hid the mochi, saying it could not be given to him because it had been pounded from stolen rice. The zato pretended to sleep, and secretly switched the signal cord tied to the husband's toe onto his own foot, and so stole and ate the mochi. In the middle of the night the wife pulled the cord meaning to wake her husband, but woke the zato instead, and the two of them ate the mochi while speaking ill of him, saying that fool was asleep. When the zato noticed the commotion he fled, and as he went he threw a straw-beating mallet into the river. The couple mistook the sound for the zato falling in, covered it over with a door panel, and kept watch over it all night, but when dawn came, what was inside was only the straw-beating mallet.
- Land
- Shiwa District
- Type
- Strange Fates
- Beings
- zato
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.