No. 30 — The fool of Senboku town

Record

A careless man of Senboku town decided to visit Shiwa Inari, and mishearing his wife's instructions one after another, he set out carrying a tooth-blackening pot instead of a rice ball, his wife's loincloth instead of a wrapping cloth, and a pestle instead of a short sword. Along the way people laughed at him, but he did not notice. He threw nearly all his money into the offering box, bought a stone thinking it was a rice cake and chipped his tooth on it, and in the end wandered into the neighboring house and scolded a woman there, mistaking her for his wife.

Source

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

Land

Shiwa District

Type

Strange Fates

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.