His wife, being very greedy and rude, was annoyed that he would waste precious food on such a small and insignificant little thing as a sparrow.

The man had to return to the mountains one day and left the bird in the care of the old woman, who had no intention of feeding it.

The wife, learning of the existence of a larger basket, ran to the sparrow's inn in the hope of getting more treasure for herself.

"[2] Others of this type include Diamonds and Toads, Mother Hulda, The Three Heads of the Well, Father Frost, The Three Little Men in the Wood, The Enchanted Wreath, The Old Witch and The Two Caskets.

[4] According to professor Hiroko Ikeda's Index of Japanese Folktales, the tale is classified as type 480D, "The Tongue-Cut Sparrow" or Shita-kiri Suzume.

B. Mitford (1871), William Elliot Griffis (1880), David Thomson (as volume 2 of Hasegawa Takejirō's Japanese Fairy Tale Series, 1885), Yei Theodora Ozaki (1903), Teresa Peirce Williston (1904), and many others.