No. 72 — A contest of liars

Record

A liar from the capital and a liar from the countryside came to call, to have a contest of lies. But the countryman's child told lies beyond measure, saying that his father had gone to prop up Mount Sumeru and his mother had gone to Tenjiku to sell the skins of fleas and lice. When the liar from the capital heard this, he took fright and went home, and the parents, worried for their child's future, scolded him severely.

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.