Scholars relate it to tale type ATU 707, "The Three Golden Children", of the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index.
Seki Keigo remarked that the Japanese story "show[ed] much similarity" to tale type 707, albeit lacking the usual reason for the wife's banishment.
[4] In a study about tale type 707, Russian scholar Khemlet Tat'yana argued that The Golden Eggplant is an example of the phenomenon where the more fantastical variants of the tale type give way to more realistic stories that treat the extraordinary elements as unreal or a factual impossibility: in the story, the lord's son returns to his father's court with seeds of a gold- and silver-producing tree, which can only be watered by a woman who has never broken wind.
[7] Scholar Kunio Yanagita located variants from across Japan in the following regions: Iwate; Fukushima; Niigata; Hiroshima; Nagasaki, Tsuhima; Kumamoto, Amakusa; Kagoshima, Kikaijima; and in Okierabujima.
[8] Keigo cited a local Okinawan legend with similar events:[9] the lord's wife is cast with her child in a boat because she was accused of breaking wind in public.
[11][12] Folklorist Richard Dorson translated another Japanese variant titled The Jewel That Grew Golden Flowers.
The boy claims to the monarch, his father, that the jewel can indeed produce golden flowers, but it can only be tended by a woman that cannot break wind.
In the Korean tale, titled "아침에 심어 저녁에 따먹는 오이" (Cucumber Planted in the Morning and Harvested in the Evening), a son is trying to find his father, because he abandoned his mother for passing wind on their wedding night.