KOREAN LITERATURE CORNER - Sept 2025

By Josh Kim

Book cover illustration by Hong Sook Hui

The Girl and the Toad

I call this myth “The Girl and the Toad,” and it’s much different than the traditional “Princess and Frog” western myth. The Korean title, 은혜 갚은 두꺼비 roughly translates to “The Toad who Returned a Favor.”

Once there was a poor girl. One day, while scooping rice in the kitchen, a toad crawled inside. He looked at her, hungry. 

“Poor thing,” said the girl. “He needs to eat.”

So she gave him some rice. He ate his whole meal, looked at her, and hopped away.

For many days the toad would come back at the same time, and the girl would feed him. Even though her family was poor, she continued to give the toad a little bit of their rice. And every day the toad ate, he got bigger.

Then one day, an infectious disease took over the village. The villagers thought they had to slay a girl as a sacrifice to the god on the mountain. Because the family of the girl sacrificed would get a lot of money, the girl offered herself. 

The night before she was to go to the temple, the toad came for rice. She gave him a lot and said: “Toad, toad, who is going to give you rice after I die? Eat this rice and live well.”

The toad understood her. He began to cry. 

The next morning, the girl began to climb the path to the mountain temple. But the toad followed her. “Toad, toad,” she said, “you will die if you follow me. Please go home.”

But the toad did not go home. He followed her. When she walked, he walked. When she stopped, he stopped. 

That night, the two reached the mountain temple. The girl sat in a room and the toad sat next to her. Suddenly they heard a strange sound and looked up—there was a monstrous centipede on the ceiling.  It tried to bite the girl’s head, but the big toad jumped up and drove the centipede away. 

The next morning, the villagers walked to the temple to prepare the girl’s body for the funeral, but they were shocked to see her alive. She told them about the centipede on the ceiling. The villagers removed the ceiling and saw the centipede. It was large and red from the blood it had sucked from people—the centipede had caused the infectious disease. 

The villagers fought, captured, and burned the centipede to death. The illness was cured and disappeared. The girl returned home with the toad and lived happily with her family.

Fun note: there’s a Korean proverb: “An enemy should be engraved in water, and a favor should be engraved on a rock.” In other words, an enemy should be forgotten, but a favor should always be remembered. There’s a trend we see in Korean lore—that of animals helping humans and repaying favors.