Learn Japanese with Stories Volume 20: Bunbuku Tea-Kettle

Discover one of Japan’s most beloved folktales while building your Japanese reading skills sentence by sentence.

Bunbuku Chagama tells the humorous and heartwarming story of a mysterious tea-kettle that cries out when scrubbed, screams when placed over a fire, and eventually reveals itself to be a shape-shifting tanuki trapped halfway through a transformation.

After a startled temple priest gives the strange kettle to a poor secondhand dealer, an unlikely friendship begins. Together, the ta...