The Kobunsha Japanese Fairy Tale Series (1886) by Takejiro Hasegawa

Once upon a time there was a kind old couple that kept a pet dog. One day the old man dug where the dog scratched and unexpectedly found a quantity of gold. Now there was a bad-hearted couple, their neighbors, who envied them their good fortune and asked them to lend their dog. As they would take no refusal, they got the dog; but when they took him along the road he would not scratch the ground. Therefore they made him scratch, and then dug where he scratched. But instead of finding gold, they only found a lot of filthy stuff. Then they got angry and killed the dog, and buried him under a small pine tree by the way side. The pine tree suddenly grew to a great size; and the kind old man cut it down and made a mortar out of the wood. When he pounded barley in that mortar the barley would flow up out of the bottom and over-flow without end. His neighbor again envied him, and borrowed his mortar to pound his barley in. But when he did so his barley all turned out cracked and worm-eaten. Then he became still more enraged and broke the mortar to pieces and used it for fire wood. The kind old man then took some of the ashes of the mortar and scattered them on dead trees, and made them blossom. He was plentifully rewarded for this with gold, silver, and pieces of silk by the prince of the country; and so he came to be called "The old man who made dead trees blossom." Again his neighbor envied him, and attempted to make dead trees blossom with the ashes. But when he took a handfid and sprinkled it on the limbs of a dead tree, the tree did not blossom, but the ashes blew into the eyes of the prince of the country. The retainers of the prince roared out: "That's a nice state of things!" and seized the old man, and all hands gave him a sore beating. With his head bruised and bloody he barely escaped. In this condition his wife saw him returning in the distance, "My husband too, I see, has been rewarded by the prince with purple garments," she said. But while she was thus rejoicing, he came near, when she looked more closely and saw that her husband instead of being clothed in purple was stained with blood. As to the man, he then took to his bed sick, and at last died.