The woman met at night who asks a passer-by to hold her child. In the oldest Japanese telling, in a twelfth-century collection, the man is one of a famous warrior’s retainers, he takes what he is handed and carries it home, and when he opens his sleeve there are a few leaves in it — the ordinary sign, in Japanese tales, that a transaction was never a transaction. The child that grows unbearably heavy, which now defines her, is not in that text. The characters used to write her name belong to a bird from Chinese sources and were attached to her in the Edo period.