• 2 years ago
Japanese Folk Tales: The Magic Kettle.

Right in the middle of Japan, among the mountains, an old man lives in his little house.

He was very proud of it, and never tired of admiring the whiteness of the straw mats, and the beautiful paper walls, which in warm weather were always open, so that the scent of trees and flowers could enter.

One day he was standing looking at the mountain opposite, when he heard some kind of rumbling sound in the room behind him.

He turned around, and in the corner he saw a rusty scrap metal kettle.

How the kettle got there, the old man did not know, but he took it and examined it carefully, and when he found that the kettle was quite intact, he dusted it off and took it to his kitchen.

'That was luck,' he said, smiling to himself; ‘a good kettle costs money, and also has a second one if needed; mine is starting to wear out, and water is starting to come out of the bottom.’

Then he took his old kettle from the fire, filled the new kettle with water, and put it in its place.

Not long after the water in the kettle got warm, a strange thing happened, and the man standing beside him thought he was dreaming.

First, the handle of the kettle gradually changes shape and becomes a head, and the spout grows into a tail, while from the body four claws emerge, and in a few minutes the man finds himself watching, not a kettle, but a tanuki. !

The creature leapt from the fire, and hopped around the room like a kitten, running up the walls and over the ceiling, until the old man was in pain so that his beautiful room would not be damaged.

He shouted for the neighbors for help, and among them they managed to catch the tanuki, and locked him safely in a crate.

Then, very tired, they sat down on the mats, and consulted together what they should do with this troublesome beast.

Finally they decided to sell it,

When the Merchant arrived, the old man informed him that he had something he wished to get rid of, and lifted the lid of the wooden chest, where he had hidden the tanuki.

But, to his surprise, there was no tanuki there, only a kettle which he found in the corner. This was certainly very strange, but the man remembered what happened in the fire, and didn't want to keep the kettle any longer, so after a bit of haggling about the price,

The merchant went with the kettle with him.

Now Merchant had not gone very far before he felt that his kettle was getting heavier and heavier, and by the time he got home he was so tired that he was grateful to put it in the corner of his room, and then forgot all about it. he.

However, in the middle of the night, he was awakened by a loud noise in the corner where the kettle was standing, and got up on the bed to see what it was. But there was nothing there except a kettle, which seemed pretty quiet.

He thought that he must be dreaming, and fell asleep again, only to be awakened a second time by the same disturbance.

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