No. 42 — The snake that visited a daughter
Every night voices were heard from the daughter's sleeping room, and when her parents questioned her, she confessed that a man wearing a crested coat had been coming to her. The parents had her stick a threaded needle into the crest on the man's coat, and the next morning they followed the thread, which led under a hall behind the house. From within the hole came the voice of a snake, a serpent, often a spirit in disguise, dying with its eye pierced by the needle, and the voice of another snake scolding it. The wounded snake said that since it had already left behind its offspring, it had nothing left to regret.
- 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.