No. 86 — The foolish son

Record

A tale of a foolish son who, whenever he received something at a relative's house, applied his mother's previous teaching unchanged to the next situation and kept failing. He dragged an iron kettle and broke it, dropped a mortar and cracked it, tried to wrap an old woman tending the fire in a cloth bundle and was beaten for it, and in the end treated a fire, a blacksmith, and even a zato, a blind itinerant musician, the same rough way and came to grief every time.

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.