After the priest had been dancing for a while he tried to pull the pot off, but it refused to be budged. A pall fell over the gathering, and people wondered blankly what to do. They tried one thing and another, only succeeding in bruising the skin around his neck. The blood streamed down, and the priest's neck became so swollen that he had trouble breathing. The others tried to split the pot, but it was not easily broken and the reverberations inside were unbearable. Finally, when all else had failed, they threw a thin garment over the legs of the pot, which stuck up like horns, and, giving the priest a stick to lean on, led him off by the hand to a doctor in Kyoto. People they met on the way stared at this apparition with constrained astonishment.
The priest presented a most extraordinary sight as he sat inside the doctor's office facing him. Whatever he said came out as an unintelligible, muffled roar. "I can't find any similar case in my medical books," said the doctor, "and there aren't any oral traditions either." The priest had no choice but to return to the Ninnaji, where his close friends and his aged mother gathered at his bedside, weeping with grief, though the priest himself probably could not hear them.
At this point somebody suggested, "Wouldn't it be better at least to save his life, even if he loses his nose and ears? Let's try pulling the pot off with all our strength." They stuffed straw around the priest's neck to protect it from the metal, then pulled hard enough to tear off his head. Only holes were left to show where his ears and nose had been, but the pot was removed. They barely managed to save the priest's life, and for a long time afterwards he was gravely ill.
--from KenkÅ's Essays in Idleness
