The Monkey and the Crab (さるかに合戦)
A Japanese Folk Tale
Improve your Japanese reading with the classic folk tale 'The Monkey and the Crab' (さるかに合戦). This app gives you a side-by-side bilingual reading experience — natural Japanese with its English translation, sentence by sentence.
Follow the story of a wronged crab and her allies — a chestnut, a bee, and a mortar — who avenge a trick. With built-in vocabulary lookups, audio, and furigana-style readings, it's a perfect way to practise reading Japanese while enjoying a timeless tale.
Part of a growing collection of Japanese folk tales, drawn from the classic Gutenberg edition of Ozaki's 'Japanese Fairy Tales'.
Source & attribution
Original text: “猿かに合戦” by 楠山正雄 (Kusuyama Masao) (1921). Public domain, via Aozora Bunko.