No. 40 — The root of 'indeed'

Record

A foolish son-in-law, not knowing how to greet properly at his marriage visit, borrowed the wisdom of an old man next door. The old man tied a string to a dried bonito stick and threaded it through a hole in the floor, so that when he pulled it as a signal, the foolish son-in-law would answer, "indeed, that is so." But while the old man had stepped out of the room, a cat began pulling at the dried bonito, and the foolish son-in-law kept giving his foolish answer again and again. At last he blurted out, "the root of 'indeed' will be cut," and so the father-in-law decided he could not give his daughter in marriage, and the match was broken off.

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.