Morinji-no-kama

This is the kindest famous story Japan has, and I'd argue it's also the funniest.

A tanuki transforms itself into a tea kettle.

Somebody puts the kettle on the fire.

And it sprouts a head, a tail, and four legs, and bolts — a half-badger, half-kettle creature careering off the hearth and out of the house with its lid rattling.

And then somebody is nice to it

A poor peddler ends up with this thing, and instead of doing what you'd expect — running, or selling it, or hitting it with something — he treats it gently.

So it repays him.

It offers to perform.

He sets up a roadside show, and the star of the act is a tea kettle with a tanuki's head and legs, and what it does is walk a tightrope, to music, above a paying crowd.

They both get rich.

And when the run is over the kettle retires honourably to Morin-ji, a temple in Gunma.

The temple is real and the kettle is on display

That's what makes this one different from every other charming folktale.

Morin-ji is in Tatebayashi, Gunma. It exists. You can go this weekend.

There is a kettle enshrined there. The grounds are full of tanuki statues — dozens of them, cheerful, with the hats and the sake bottles and the famously oversized anatomy.

A comic monster with a fully operational pilgrimage site.

The temple's own version is stranger, and better

Because the story above is the popular one. Morin-ji has its own, and it's not a folktale — it's an institutional legend, and it has a different shape entirely.

There was a priest at Morin-ji named Shukaku.

Shukaku had a tea kettle that never ran out. Hot water day and night, endlessly — and on one occasion it served a gathering of a thousand priests without going dry.

And eventually Shukaku sat everyone down and confessed.

He was not a man. He was an ancient tanuki — thousands of years old — and he had been living at the temple as a priest, doing the work.

And then he left, in peace. Nobody drove him out. Nobody exorcised him. He simply told the truth and departed.

Think about what that story is doing

The shapeshifting animal in this tradition is usually a nuisance at best. It tricks travellers, it possesses people, it turns up as a beautiful stranger and ruins a household.

Shukaku was a devout and excellent priest.

He served the temple faithfully for years, gave it an inexhaustible kettle, watered a thousand monks at a single sitting, and when his cover was blown he resigned with dignity.

That's the exact inverse of the tradition's other institutional shapeshifters — the abbots whose grudges turn them into monsters that wreck temples. Here the monster was the good one. Nobody was harmed. The kettle was excellent.

The popular tale is the Edo softening of this: same tanuki, same kettle, turned into a kindness-repaid parable with a circus act in it.

The name is a pun and both halves are true

Bunbuku, in Bunbuku Chagama — the story's proper title — reads two ways.

It might be onomatopoeia: the sound of water boiling. Bun-buku, bun-buku.

Or it might be written 分福 — "sharing out the fortune."

The kettle boils, and the luck gets shared.

Both readings are correct, and neither one needs the other to be wrong. Which is about as good as a pun gets.