The Crab and the Monkey

David Thomson's translation, The Battle of the Monkey and the Crab, was published as the third volume of Hasegawa Takejirō's Japanese Fairy Tale Series in 1885.

The chestnut hides himself on the monkey's hearth, the bee in the water pail, the cow dung on the floor, and the usu on the roof.

He tries to run out of the house, but the cow dung makes him slip and the usu falls down from the roof, killing the monkey by crushing his heart, causing him to bleed out and die.

In a version of the story published in a Japanese textbook in 1887, an egg appears in place of the chestnut and a piece of kelp replaces the cow dung.

In the version of the story published by Andrew Lang, the crab gathers the unripe fruit and is not killed, but the monkey leaves her for dead.

In a completely different version of the story, when the monkey climbs the tree and takes all the persimmons the crab advises him to hang his basket of fruit from a branch.