Folklore, retold
The story as it is told
A retelling, not a citation. What follows is the story as the most widely circulated popular accounts tell it — folklore encyclopedias, translations, and the versions that have travelled furthest. It is synthesized rather than keyed line by line to the dated primary texts, and popular versions drift from what those texts actually say. The cited, source-by-source record begins further down this page, and where the two disagree, the record wins.
A man named Tōtarō is crossing a bridge and finds a creature crouched underneath it, weeping.
Inky black skin. Emerald green eyes. A face like a demon's and a beard like a dragon's.
It is a shark-man, and it has been banished from the dragon king's palace under the sea, and it has nowhere to go.
So Tōtarō takes it home and puts it in his garden pond, and feeds it, and lets it stay.
Then Tōtarō falls in love
He sees a woman at a temple festival and cannot stop thinking about her.
She's of high family, and the bride-price is impossible: ten thousand jewels.
Not money. Jewels. A number designed to end the conversation.
He goes home and takes to his bed and begins, in the way of stories like this, to die of it.
And the shark-man cries
The samebito finds out what's wrong.
And it weeps — for its friend, who took it in when it had been thrown out of everywhere else, and who is now dying over something the shark-man cannot fix.
And its tears turn to blood.
And the blood-tears harden into rubies as they fall.
They gather them off the floor. There are enough.
Grief with an exchange rate
That's the image, and it's the reason this story has lasted.
The tears are real. The samebito isn't performing a trick or manufacturing gems. It is genuinely, helplessly crying, because someone it loves is dying — and what falls out of it happens to be worth ten thousand jewels.
Sorrow with an exchange value.
And the only currency that buys it is kindness. Nobody can commission this. You cannot pay a samebito to cry. The one and only way to obtain the treasure is to have been decent to it first, and then to be in trouble.
There's a version where Tōtarō, needing more, asks it to cry again — and it can't, because you cannot weep to order.
Where it comes from, which is fully traceable
This one has an unusually clean paper trail, three links long.
One: the Chinese jiaoren. The shark-people of the South China Sea. Mermaid- like, and described as always weaving at their looms — and their tears become pearls.
Two: Kyokutei Bakin, the great Edo novelist, adapting them into Japanese as Kōjin.
Three: Lafcadio Hearn, "The Gratitude of the Samebito," which is the telling everyone knows — Tōtarō's compassion, the exile from the dragon palace, the ruby tears.
And Hearn gives it the ending it deserves: the samebito is eventually pardoned, and allowed to go home to the sea.
One small thing about the palace
It's worth noticing that this creature has a jurisdiction.
It wasn't a monster wandering loose. It was a member of the dragon king's court who got thrown out — an exile with a case pending, sitting under a bridge on the surface of the world because the underwater government had done with it.
And the story ends with the sentence being lifted.
Which makes this, unusually, a yokai story about someone getting their job back.
Field guide
At a glance
- Behavior
- An exile from the dragon king's court, weeping in a garden pond; devoted to the human who sheltered him.
- Powers
- His tears of blood harden into rubies — grief with exchange value.
- Weaknesses
- Homesickness; his exile is the whole of his suffering, and a pardon ends the tale.
- Oddities
- Descends from the Chinese jiaoren, shark-people whose tears become pearls and who are always weaving.
- He weeps jewels exactly once — for his benefactor's impossible bride-price — and cannot cry on demand afterward.
Overview
A shark-man — "inky black skin, emerald green eyes, a face like a demon's, and a beard like a dragon's" — banished from the dragon king's palace, weeping in a garden pond. When his human benefactor falls deathly ill over an impossible bride-price of ten thousand jewels, the samebito cries tears of blood that harden into rubies — grief as dowry. The tradition's most haunting act of gratitude.
The lineage (three links, fully traceable)
- Chinese jiaoren: the shark-people of the South China Sea — ningyo-like, "always weaving at their looms," whose tears become jewels/pearls [wikipedia-samebito].
- Kyokutei Bakin's Kōjin — the Edo literary adaptation [wikipedia-samebito].
- Hearn, "The Gratitude of the Samebito" (Shadowings, 1900/1905 — verify the collection year) — the canonical telling: Tōtarō's compassion, Ryūjin's exile, the ruby tears, and the ending where the samebito is pardoned home [wikipedia-samebito]. Public domain — retrieval/archive candidate like the Kwaidan texts.
The tears-to-jewels equation is the payload: sorrow having exchange value; kindness the only currency that buys it. With hone-onna's Chinese-sourced lineage, the samebito demonstrates the tradition's standing east-China current.
Two-track labeling
The image
Citations
The record
- [wikipedia-samebito]"Samebito," Wikipedia (retrieved 2026-07-24), Tier C.modern reference English Wikipedia's article on this subject, as retrieved in 2026 — an aggregate starting point, not a primary source.All-source record
Where the evidence thins
Open questions
- Hearn's Shadowings text — Gutenberg retrieval + archive.
- Bakin's Kōjin source.
- Jiaoren in the Soushenji/Bowuzhi (the Chinese primaries).