No. 43 — Destroying the snake's child with mercury

Record

To help a daughter who had come to carry the child of a snake, a serpent, often a spirit in disguise, the parents drew water into a tub and had her use mercury. Then the snake's child in her belly suffered and died, it was said.

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

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.