Text Transcription
“The basic story is there’s this tanuki racoon that causes trouble for this old couple, and one day the tanuki gets caught by the old man in his fields, and he ties the raccoon up and hangs him upside down in his house.
Then, while the old man is gone one day and the wife is cooking, the raccoon begs the wife to set him free and that he’ll help her (which she does). In the version I read as a kid, he obviously tricks her and (maybe) hits her. I think the most that happens is that the wife lays on the ground injured, but in the original, she’s killed. Also in the original, the raccoon transforms into the wife, cooks the wife, and serves the old man a soup with his wife’s flesh
So in my kids version the old man gets angry because the tanuki hit his wife and fled, but in the original I guess it’s way more violent since she’s killed and fed to him.
And so the old man begs this other animal, the rabbit (who’s a good friend) to get revenge/avenge his wife, and the Wikipedia article just vaguely lists that the rabbit pretended to befriend the tanuki but tortured him like by dropping a bee’s nest on him, “treating” it with “medicine” that actually burned the injury. Then (and this is where the title comes from) while the tanuki is carrying a pile of sticks on his back, setting fire on that pile of sticks but brushing off the sound of the burning by saying they’re nearing “kachi kachi yama” which is why they can hear burning, until it’s too late and it burns him.
In the version I read as a kid, I think the burning incident happens first, and then the rabbit “treats” the burn with the “medicine,” so there’s no other torture that i can recall like the bee’s nest.
And then the last part of the story is that the rabbit and the tanuki have a boat race (I can’t remember the reason). In the original, the rabbit carved his boat out of a tree while the tanuki made a boat out of mud (which would dissolve).
In my version, I think the rabbit built both boats, and I can’t recall if one was wood and the other was mud, but I think the rabbit tricks the tanuki into being like “oh this boat is too heavy,” or maybe instead he calls one sturdier? Either way he hints at one being worse or better and the tanuki takes whichever is better, but then the boat starts to fall apart in the race.
In the original, in the end, the tanuki dies from drowning (and I think in some version the rabbit strikes him to ensure he drowns), but in my version, the rabbit makes him swear to stop his deeds and then pulls him out, and the ending instead is that the tanuki befriends the rabbit and the couple for real this time.”
Context
This is a Japanese folktale the informant heard growing up. As a child, she heard the watered-down version of the story, where the wife is not killed by the tanuki and in the end they all learn to coexist. Later on, she learned that the original story is much darker, ending in not one but two deaths.
It isn’t unsurprising to see a story censored for a younger audience. We’ve seen it in western fairy tales too: Cinderella’s stepsisters get to keep their feet intact in Disney’s take on the story. But I think it’s interesting to note how this watered down completely changes, even reverses, the moral of the story. In the children’s version, the moral is a lesson in forgiveness and learning your lesson. In the original, it’s more akin to “what goes around comes around.” The old man doesn’t forgive the tanuki for its role in his wife’s death, and enacts his vengeance through his friend the rabbit. The different versions of this story are two sides of the same coin, and in trying to curate the story for a younger audience, the original message is seemingly abandoned.
One thing the informant noted is that tanuki’s are generally well-meaning, playful tricksters in the stories that feature. This is the only story they know of where the tanuki plays a villainous role. In censoring the original tale, the tanuki in this story has inadvertently become more similar to its counterparts in other stories.