Page:Anthology of Japanese Literature.pdf/221

Rh Since the gourds were few in number, the old woman, wishing to get the largest possible amount of rice out of them, neither gave any away to other people nor ate any herself. But her children said, “The old lady next door gave some gourds to her neighbors and ate some herself. All the more should you do so, since you had three seeds to start with. You ought to give some away, and we should eat some ourselves.” Accordingly, she picked quite a number of gourds, both for the neighbors and her own family, but the gourds proved to be horribly bitter, and made everyone feel nauseous and giddy. Everyone who ate any fell violently ill, and the old woman’s outraged neighbors went in a body to her house intending to scold her. “What on earth has she given us?” they asked one another. “How dreadful of her! Even those of us who no more than smelled one vomited, and we were so sick that we nearly died.” When they arrived at her house, however, the old woman and her children were prostrate and vomiting all over the room. There was evidently no use in complaining, and the neighbors went home.

It was two or three days before they had all recovered. The old woman thought to herself, “I wanted to keep the gourds so that they would all produce rice, but we were in too much of a hurry to eat them. That is no doubt why this accident happened.” She picked all the remaining gourds and put them away.

When several months had passed, and she thought that the gourds had reached the proper stage, she went into the storeroom with some tubs in which to hold the rice after she had poured it out. She was immensely pleased, and her toothless old mouth was grinning from ear to ear as she carried over one of the tubs and poured the contents of a gourd into it. But what came out was not rice, but hornets, bees, centipedes, scorpions, snakes, and other such creatures, and they fastened upon her and stung her eyes and nose and her whole body. Yet for the moment the old woman felt no pain at all. She thought that they were just grains of rice bouncing up out of the container and hitting her. She said, “Just wait a while, you sparrows! I’ll see that you each get a little bit.”

The many poisonous insects that emerged from the seven or eight gourds stung and bit her children too, and the old woman herself