No. 31 — Ubakawa
A peasant's father promised to give one of his daughters in marriage to a snake, a serpent, often a spirit in disguise, that had saved a frog, and the youngest daughter agreed and went to marry the snake. The daughter threw needles into the snake's den and destroyed the whole clan of great serpents, and when she lost her way in the mountains, an old woman who was a transformation of the snake helped her and gave her the ubakawa; taking the form of an old woman, she served as a fire-tender in the house of the choja, a very rich man. At night she secretly took off the ubakawa and, in her beautiful true form, was reading a book, when the choja's son caught sight of her and fell in love with her; by nursing him through the sickness of love and curing him, she was taken as his bride.
- Land
- Shiwa District
- Beings
- snake
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.