Believing her lies, the father expels his son from home, but gives him some provisions for the road: a beautiful kimono and his best horse.
Travelling to another town, he finds works as a gardener and a cook for a local lord, and is given the name "fire boy".
This repeats the next day, but with a difference: his master's daughter returns home because she forgot a sandal; seeing the girl there, the Fire boy-as-rider takes her on the horse to the festival.
The lord's daughter falls ill with longing for the mysterious rider, and a shrine priestess advises her father to line up all of his male staff.
She sees that her beloved, the fire boy, is not there, so her father summons him and tells some servants to clean him up and dress him in better clothes.
[2] In his 1987 study of folktales, folklorist D. L. Ashliman classified the Japanese tale as type AaTh 314, "The Golden-Haired Boy and his Magic Horse".
[3] In Hiroko Ikeda's index of Japanese folktales, this tale is classified as type 314, "Cinder Boy (Haibo, Neko no Tsura)":[4] a youth leaves home (either expelled by his stepmother or flees from a cannibal sister) and works under a master as his bath heater; he goes to a play and his master's daughter sees him in fine clothes; she finds out the young man at the play is the bath heater, and marries him.
[12] Seki Keigo located similar stories in the following regions: Aomori, Ishikawa, Iwate, Ogasawara, Kagoshima, Nagano, Nagasaki, Niigata, Okayama, Shimane, Tokushima, and Yamanashi.
[14] Yanagita provided the summary of a tale from Ikinoshima, Nagasaki: a youth named Sanpachi works as a bath heater to a warrior, but is actually a samurai who has fallen on hard times.
[15][16] Korean scholarship reports similar tales in Korea, with the title 재복데기 (Jaebokdegi; English: "Cinder Sweeper").
The youth escapes a cruel treatment by his stepmother or other cruel fate; is given a magical vest and a flute that allows him to fly; he flies to a banquet and impresses his master's family and guests, who also mistake him for a "Taoist high official" (seongwan); at the end of the tale marries his master's daughter.
So the boy tells his mother to sew him a fine silken garment, for he plans to find a job and a wife somewhere in the world.
[18] In another tale, Die Jadeflöte ("The Jade Flute"), a childless minister has a dream: an ethereal emissary points him to location behind the mountains.
The boy arrives at a town and finds work as a floor sweeper and horse groomer to a local master.