Tale of the Blind Snake Bride
What happens when you are too picky choosing a spouse
This is the Japanese folktale of a mother who sacrifices her eyes for her child, and how hard it is to date outside your species.
In Fukae (now Nagasaki), a man lives alone with his mother. He’s swiping right on all the hotties in Fukae, but who gets excited by a guy’s profile where all the woodblock prints have his mom in them?
To pass the time, because loneliness doesn’t fill itself, he often hikes up Mount Unzen. One day, he sees some kids who have caught a gorgeous white snake with enchantingly alluring eyes. Being a keen reader of manga, our hero figures he’d better save the snake. It’s too beautiful to be a side character. Having done a good deed, he goes home.
Some time later, a huge storm passes over Fukae. While admiring the storminess, the man notices a beautiful woman huddled under the eaves. Sheltering from a storm under the eaves of someone’s house was the ancient equivalent of slipping into someone’s DMs. Naturally, the woman and man get married.
Nine months after the wedding and associated sexy bebe-making activities, surprisingly, the wife makes a bebe.
One day, the grandmother peeks into the nursery to see the peacefully sleeping bebe and say, “Aww…” But she sees a giant snake curled around the child, and says, “Ahh!” She quickly tells her son and he throws a hissy fit. He can’t believe he’s been poking his tiny snake into a giant snake all this time!
When confronted, snake-waifu explains she came to the man’s house in the form of a beautiful woman to thank him for saving her from the kids, who would surely have killed her.
After hearing her good intentions and calm explanation, the man becomes very understanding. He understands that he has been snakefished by a dirty snake monster. He divorces snake-waifu, but wants to keep snek-bebe. Instead of swallowing him whole and slowly digesting his treacherous ass, ex-snake-waifu tells him she’ll return to her pond on Mount Unzen: “If you have trouble with our not-quite-human part-mystical bebe, come look for me atop my fully-mystical mountain in my fully-mystical pond.”
Unfortunately, being a single father is harder than being a married husband. The bebe refuses to consume anything that does not come out of his mother’s boobage, so the father carries the bebe to the pond at the top of Mount Unzen.
As promised, snake-mama-san appears, and in an act both adorable and disgusting takes out one of her eyeballs and hands it to the father. Once the gore has dripped off, the eyeball shines like a precious jewel. “Here, take this absolutely gross yet strangely beautiful token of my love. If our bebe sucks on it, he’ll get all the milk he needs.”
On their way back down the holy mountain, they run into a group of samurai, who search him just because they can. They find the eyeball and, mistaking it for a beautiful jewel, confiscate it to give it to their lord. Either these samurai had their own eyes gouged out or their lord really likes eyeballs, because who mistakes an eye for a jewel?
The bebe once more refuses to eat or drink, and criesssss inccccccessssssantly. The father has no choice but to return to the pond. Infinitely patient ex-snake-waifu-san gouges out her remaining eyeball, weeping as she hands it over.
Meanwhile, the lord is so charmed by the shiny jewel his samurai stole for him that he wants to gift it to the shogun. But eyes are best in pairs, so he sends his samurai out to Mount Unzen to find a matching jewel. The samurai run into the extremely unlucky man and take the second jewel from him.
In despair, the man returns to the pond to have the most difficult conversation of his life. Ex-snake-waifu-sama is just absolutely DONE with all this BS and it is said that her fury caused the 1792 Unzen landslide and tsunami, collapsing half the mountain and killing 15,000 people.
This is what happens when you are too picky choosing a spouse.