No. 20 — The transformed tea kettle

Record

Monjiya no Kichi, who had lost at gambling, met a fox, a shape-shifting fox, near Hodoshima, and gave it red bean rice and herring in exchange for it transforming into a fine tea kettle, which he then sold at a high price to the priest of a mountain temple. When a young monk washed the kettle and set it over the fire, it cried out in pain, saying it hurt and that it was hot, and showed its ears, tail, and legs, revealing its true form, then turned back into a fox and fled back to the mountain.

Source

Ogasawara Kenkichi (ed.), Shiwa-gun Mukashibanashi-shu (1938) — National Diet Library Digital Collections (Japanese text)

Land

Shiwa District

Type

Yokai and the Uncanny, Shape-Shifting Animals

Beings

fox

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.