No. 75 — The moonflower choja

Record

There was a fortunate elder brother and a poor, honest younger brother. When the younger brother lost his seed rice, he borrowed some from his elder brother, but the elder brother deliberately lent him seed rice that had been soaked in hot water. Even when he planted it, no seedlings grew, only a single moonflower grew, and when he split open its fruit, rice poured out abundantly from inside. The younger brother repeated this harvest and became a choja, a very rich man.

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.