No. 29 — The fox's bride-taking

Monjiya no Kichi was asked by the choja, a very rich man, to find him a bride, and he asked the foxes, shape-shifting foxes, to disguise themselves as a bridal procession and let the wedding be held. The next morning, a horse's bone hung from the ceiling, and fox footprints covered the main room and the veranda everywhere, and it became known that the bride had truly been a fox. the choja pressed Kichi for the truth, but Kichi kept a straight face and claimed to know nothing, and evaded him.

Source: Ogasawara Kenkichi (ed.), Shiwa-gun Mukashibanashi-shu (1938) — National Diet Library Digital Collections (Japanese text)
Land: Shiwa District
Type: Shape-Shifting Animals, Strange Fates
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.