Hukumusume fairy tale collection > Foreign language (English) > Short stories of Edo

Stingy
(Short stories of Edo)

Translation　ちいさな翻訳屋さん

Japanese　←→　Japanese ＆ English　←→　English

　Once upon a time, there lived an extremely stingy man.

　He was so stingy that everyone in the nearby villages knew him for that.


　One day, he caught his foot on a nail in the hallway.

　Looking carefully, he found the head of an old nail sticking up.

　So the man called his wife and said,

“Go borrow a hammer from the next door.

　He can’t say no because I let him borrow my scale once three years ago.”


　The wife immediately went to the next door but didn’t return for some time.

　After a while, the wife finally returned and told the man,

“Honey, the man next door asked me why I needed the hammer. And when I told him that I needed it to pound a nail,

what he said to me was, ‘Pounding a nail would wear out my hammer!’.”

“What a stingy man he is!

　… If that’s the case, I guess I’ll have to use my own…”

The end.

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