The tale also depicts the motif of a government official from the ruling class taking away a woman in a relationship with a lower-class male civilian.
There is also Luonuxing (螺女形) in a story collection titled Soushen houji (搜神後記 Sequel to Records of the Strange) compiled by the poet Tao Qian (陶潛, 365-474 BC).
[6] As for Korean versions of the tale, there is Jogae sokeseo naon yeoja (조개 속에서 나온 여자The Woman Who Came Out of a Shell) in Ondol yahwa (온돌야화 Late Night Tales Told on Ondol Floors),[7] which is a Japanese-language collection of Korean folktales by Jeong In-seop that was published in Tokyo in 1927.
The man looked around to find nothing but a snail shell at the edge of the rice paddy, so he brought it home and kept it in a water jar.
Curious to find out who was cooking, the man pretended to leave for work one day and crept back to keep an eye on the house.
One day, the mother-in-law wished to stay home to enjoy some crispy leftover rice, so she asked her daughter-in-law to deliver lunch to her son.
The husband ultimately failed to find his wife although he went to the magistrate's office looking for her, which caused him to die of despair and become reborn as a blue bird.
Most variations of this folktale lead to an unhappy ending like the plot introduced above, either by the couple committing suicide or other means of death.
Meanwhile, another variation bears no mention of a magistrate but arrives at an unhappy ending when the snail bride fails to become wholly human because she marries before the right time comes.
In one rare variation that finishes with a happy ending, the magistrate hosts a banquet for beggars in an attempt to make the snail bride laugh.
At this, the snail bride finally laughs so that the magistrate hands his official robe to the husband, suggesting that he would like to try on the bird feather costume.
Yet, describing that it is the snail bride's duty to be good at cooking indicates that the term "Ureongi gaksi" represents women who are homemakers in their in-laws' household.