No. 21 — The packhorse
A horse trader fell into a muddy paddy and swallowed a frog into his body through his rear, and the frog began to croak inside his belly. On the advice of a horse doctor, he swallowed a cormorant to subdue the frog, and when the cormorant thrashed about, it was pulled out together with his intestines using a bear-claw rake. He treated his stomach by brewing and drinking the cotton padding from his mother's and his wife's padded winter robes, but in the end he ate a rice ball with a live ember still on it, and the cotton inside his belly caught fire — which became the origin of the saying "the chest burns." A comic tale.
- Land
- Shiwa District
- Beings
- frog, cormorant
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.