A very long time ago in Japan, two girls lived next door to each other in Mikawa province. Their only source of earning their living was by raising silk worms. One of the girls did really well with her silk worms. The second girl tried very hard to raise the silk worms but she could not. All her attempts failed. The first girl became richer and the second one became poorer. All the youths and the girls that assisted her lost interest and left her one after another. All her silk worms started dying. Only one of them was left. This single silk worm ate the mulberry leaves well and it grew bigger day by day. On one hand, the second girl thought that it was futile to raise a single silk worm but on the other hand, she took great care of it. Ultimately, it became a strangely big worm.
The Dog and the Worm
One day, the second girl took this big worm outside to feed it mulberry leaves. She had kept a little white dog at her house which stood at the door wagging its tail. The dog kept a watch on the silk worm outside the house. When the girl was not looking, the dog quickly took the worm and ate it up. The girl was very upset and on the verge of crying. To see the last worm being eaten up by the dog made her lose all hope. She cried over her bad luck. But it was something that the dog had done. What could she do about it? On the other hand, the dog lay unaware of what damage it had done. It did not care. Sadly, the girl looked at it and felt sorry for herself. Suddenly, the dog sneezed. The girl noticed something like a pair of white threads running out of its nose about one inch long.
Dog’s-head Thread
The threads that came out of the dog’s nose looked exactly like silk. It was strange. The girl took the ends of the threads and tried drawing them out. Both the ends were very long and seemed unending. She quickly brought the reel and fastened the ends to it. Then, she began winding it. The threads kept coming out. She filled a hundred reels and then two hundred reels, but the thread still did not break. After about thirty-five or forty pounds of thread had come out, the dog, all of a sudden, fell down and died. The girl thought that the dog was a messenger from God, so she buried the dog under a mulberry bush in the back garden. State ceremonies were being held in Kyoto about that time. An official went out into all the land searching for thread for the Emperor’s garments.
The Silk
The official looked into the first girl’s house. There was a huge amount of silk. But it was dark and so full of knots that it could not be used. He saw the silk floss bleaching in the yard of the second girl. It was pure white and had such a beautiful sheen that it seemed to be perfect material for the emperor’s clothes. The official immediately went to the second girl and bought all the silk. The girl was no longer poor now. The following year, silk worms appeared by themselves on the mulberry tree in the back yard where the dog had been buried. They produced the same kind of beautiful thread. Since then, the silk floss at Mikawa always was finer than that of other regions. It definitely was the result of the eggs from the worm in the dog’s head.
