The Legends of Tono (Tono Monogatari) · Full text

All the stories written here I heard from Mr. Sasaki Kyoseki, a man of Tono. Since around February of last year, the 42nd year of Meiji, he has come to visit me now and then in the evening and told me stories like these. I wrote them down.

Kyoseki is not a skilled talker, but he is an honest man. I, too, have written them as I felt them, without adding or taking away a single word.

In the district of Tono there must still be hundreds of stories like these. I sincerely wish to hear more. In villages deeper in the mountains than Tono, there must be countless more legends of mountain gods and mountain people. I beg that they be told, to make the people of the plains tremble. This book is no more than a beginning.

At the end of August last year, I visited Tono.

It is a journey of some ten ri from Hanamaki, with only three towns along the way. The rest is nothing but green mountains and fields. Houses are fewer even than on the Ishikari plain in Hokkaido. Perhaps, since it is a newly opened road, few people have settled along it yet. By comparison the old castle town of Tono is lively, with even a pleasure quarter.

I borrowed a horse from the innkeeper and rode alone around the nearby villages. The horse wore thick tassels woven of black seaweed, because there are so many horseflies.

The valley of the Sarugaishi River has rich soil and is well cultivated. There are more stone monuments along the roadside than anywhere else I know. Looking out from a height, I saw the early rice just ripe and the late rice in full flower, and the water had all been let out of the paddies into the river. Each variety of rice has its own color. Where three, four or five paddies of the same color lie together, they belong to one household, and probably share one name. Such small place names are known only to the owners. They appear without fail only in old land deeds.

When I crossed into the valley of Tsukimoushi, Mount Hayachine appeared faint in the haze. It is shaped like a sedge hat, or like the katakana letter "he." In this valley the rice ripens later still, and everything as far as the eye could see was green.

As I went along a narrow path between the paddies, a bird I did not know crossed in front of me with its chicks. The chicks were black mixed with white feathers. At first I took them for little chickens, but they hid in the grass of a ditch and vanished, and I knew they were wild birds.

On the hill of Tenjin there was a festival, with a lion dance. There alone a little dust rose, and something red flickered, bright against the green of the whole village. The lion dance is really a deer dance. Wearing masks with deer antlers, five or six boys dance together with drawn swords. The flute is high and the singing low, so that even close by it is hard to make out.

The sun sank and a wind rose. The voices of drunkards calling to one another sounded lonely. The women laughed and the children ran about. Even so, there was no helping the melancholy of the traveler.

At Bon, houses where someone has died in the past year raise red and white banners high to call the spirits home. Stopping my horse at the top of a pass and looking east and west, I could see those banners in a dozen places. The villagers who would someday leave this land, the traveler who had wandered in by chance, and that serene holy mountain: the slowly falling dusk wrapped them all.

The district of Tono has eight Kannon halls, each with a Kannon carved from a single tree. That day many people had come to give thanks; lights could be seen on the hill and the sound of gongs could be heard. In the grass at a fork in the road, a straw figure from the festival for rain and wind lay on its back like a tired man.

These are the impressions I received in Tono.

A book like this is not, at least, in fashion today. Some will say that however easy printing has become, it is bad manners to publish such a book and force one's own narrow tastes on others.

But I will say this. Who could hear such stories and see such a place and not want to tell others? No one so silent and discreet is, at least, among my friends.

Our great predecessor of nine hundred years ago, the Konjaku Monogatari, was already telling stories of "long ago" in its own day. But the stories in this book are things happening right now. I will not claim they surpass that book in piety or sincerity. But in that they have not passed through many mouths and have scarcely been touched by anyone's pen, that innocent Lord Dainagon (Minamoto no Takakuni, said to have compiled the Konjaku) might well find it worth his while to come here and listen. The ghost-story books of recent years are base in intent and may well be fabricated. I am secretly ashamed to have this book set beside them.

In short, this book records present facts. That alone, I believe, is reason enough to put it before the world.

Still, Kyoseki is only twenty-four or twenty-five, and I am no more than ten years older. What if I am reproached for mistaking what matters, for spending my strength in the wrong place, in an age when there is so much work to be done? What if I am told that I am like the horned owl of Myojin's hill, ears pricked too sharp and eyes too round? Well, it cannot be helped. That reproach, at least, I must bear myself.

Grown old, it neither flies nor cries,
the owl of the far woods: does it laugh at me?

Yanagita Kunio

The district of Tono is a basin ringed by mountains, covering the western half of what is now Kamihei district in Iwate Prefecture. It is divided into the town of Tono and ten villages: Tsuchibuchi, Tsukimoushi, Matsuzaki, Aozasa, Kamigo, Tomo, Ayaori, Masuzawa, Miyamori and Tassobe. In the Edo period it was called Nishihei district, and in the Middle Ages also Tono-ho.

At its center, the town of Tono is the seat of the district office, the castle town of the Nanbu family, with ten thousand koku. The castle is also called Yokota Castle.

To get there, you leave the train at Hanamaki station, cross the Kitakami River, and go thirteen ri east up the valley of its tributary, the Sarugaishi. It is a lively town, rare so deep in the mountains.

According to legend, the district of Tono was in ancient times one great lake. When its waters flowed out as the Sarugaishi River, villages arose. That is why so many streams flow into the Sarugaishi, and it is said there are "seven nai and eight saki." Nai means a stream or valley and is common in place names in the northeast.

* The "To" of Tono probably comes from an Ainu word meaning lake. Nai is Ainu too.

The town of Tono lies where rivers coming from the south and the north meet. In the old days it was said, "seven valleys, seventy ri": goods gathered from seventy ri deep in seven valleys, and on market days the town bustled with a thousand horses and a thousand people.

Of the surrounding mountains, the highest and most beautiful is Mount Hayachine, deep in Tsukimoushi to the north. To the east rises Mount Rokkoushi. Mount Ishigami stands between Tsukimoushi and Tassobe, lower than the other two.

In ancient times a goddess came to this highland with her three daughters.

On the night they stayed near what is now the Izu Gongen shrine in Rainai village, the mother goddess said:

"To the daughter who has the best dream tonight, I will give the best mountain."

Late in the night a wondrous flower fell from the heavens and came to rest on the eldest daughter's breast. But the youngest daughter woke, quietly took the flower and laid it on her own breast.

So the youngest won Hayachine, the most beautiful, and the elder sisters got Rokkoushi and Ishigami. The three goddesses still live on their mountains and rule over them.

That is why, they say, the women of Tono still do not go up those mountains for pleasure, for fear of the goddesses' jealousy.

* The ri meant here is the small ri of five or six cho, about 600 meters.

* Tassobe, too, is probably an Ainu word.

* Rainai is also Ainu: rai means death, nai a stream. Perhaps it was named for the stillness of its water.

Deep in the mountains live the mountain people.

Sasaki Kahei, an old man of Wano in Tochinai village, is past seventy and still hale. When he was young, he went deep into the mountains to hunt and saw, on a rock far off, a beautiful woman combing her long black hair. Her face was white, almost translucent.

Kahei was a bold man, and he raised his gun at once and fired. The woman fell.

When he ran to her, he found a tall woman whose loosened black hair was longer than she was. To keep as proof, he cut off a little of the hair, tied it in a coil, put it inside his kimono and set off home.

On the way, he was suddenly overcome with sleepiness. As he dozed in a sheltered spot, somewhere between dream and waking, a tall man came up, put his hand inside Kahei's kimono, took back the black hair and went away.

He woke with a start. That, they say, must have been a mountain man.

The master of a house called Kichibei in Yamaguchi village was cutting bamboo grass on a mountain called Nekodachi. As he shouldered his bundle and was about to stand, he noticed the wind passing over the bamboo grass.

He looked, and a young woman carrying a small child on her back was coming from the woods beyond, walking on top of the bamboo grass. She was very beautiful, and she too had long black hair hanging down. The cord that held the child was wisteria vine. Her kimono was ordinary striped cloth, but the hem was in tatters, patched with leaves of every kind. Her feet did not seem to touch the ground.

The woman came on as if nothing were unusual, passed right in front of Kichibei, and went off somewhere.

Kichibei took to his bed from the fright of it, lay ill a long time, and recently died.

* Kichibei is a name handed down from generation to generation, so this master was probably Kichibei too.

From Tono to Tanohama and Kirikiri on the coast, there was from old times a mountain road over Fuefuki Pass. It is a shortcut from Yamaguchi village toward Mount Rokkoushi.

Lately, however, anyone crossing this pass was sure to meet a mountain man or mountain woman. Everyone grew afraid to use it, and at last a new road was opened by way of Sakaigi Pass. Now people use that road, with Wayama as the station for changing horses. It is a detour of more than two ri.

* Yamaguchi, "mountain mouth," is the way up Mount Rokkoushi, and so it became the village's name.

In Tono, large farming households are still called choja, "rich men."

The daughter of the choja of Nukamae in Aozasa village vanished one day, and many years passed.

A hunter of the same village went into the mountains and met a woman. Frightened, he was about to shoot when she said:

"Aren't you Uncle So-and-so? Don't shoot."

When he looked closely, it was the choja's daughter.

"How do you come to be in a place like this?"

"I was carried off by someone, and now I'm his wife. I've borne many children, but my husband ate them all, and so I'm alone, as you see. I will end my life here. Don't tell anyone. You're in danger too, so go home quickly."

The hunter, they say, fled home without even finding out where she lived.

* Nukamae is the village in front of Nukamori. Nukamori is the same as the nukazuka mounds found everywhere; there are many in Tono too.

The daughter of a farming family in Kamigo village went into the mountains to gather chestnuts and never came back. Her family gave her up for dead and held a funeral with her pillow in place of her body.

Two or three years later, a hunter of the same village came to a place like a rock shelter, overhung by a great boulder, halfway up Mount Goyo, and unexpectedly met the girl.

"How do you come to be in these mountains?"

"In the mountains a frightening person carried me off and brought me here. I want to escape, but there's never the slightest chance."

"What kind of person?"

"To me he looks like an ordinary person, but he's very tall and his eyes are a little frightening. I've borne several children, but he says they don't look like him, so they aren't his, and he takes them all away somewhere, whether to eat them or kill them I don't know."

"Is he really a human being like us?"

"His clothes are ordinary too. Only the color of his eyes is a little different. Once or twice every five days, four or five others like him gather, talk about something, and go off somewhere again. They bring food from outside, so they must go into town too."

Then the girl said:

"Even while we're talking, he might come back."

The hunter grew frightened too and hurried home. It seems to have been about twenty years ago.

* The original's hitoichiai is the span from one market day to the next. The Tono market is held six times a month, so it amounts to five days.

That women and children who are out at dusk are spirited away is the same here as anywhere else.

In a house at a place called Samuto in Matsuzaki village, a young girl left her straw sandals under a pear tree and disappeared.

One day more than thirty years later, when relatives and acquaintances had gathered at that house, a woman, very old and haggard, came home. It was that girl.

"Why have you come back?"

"I wanted to see everyone. Well then, I'll be going again."

And with that the woman vanished again without a trace.

That day a fierce wind was blowing. So even now, on days when the wind is loud, the people of Tono say, "It's the kind of day the old woman of Samuto might come home."

An old man named Kikuchi Yanosuke carried loads by packhorse when he was young. He was a master of the flute, and when driving his horses through the night he often played as he walked.

One night under a hazy moon, as he and his companions were going over Sakaigi Pass toward the coast, playing the flute for their amusement again, they passed above a deep valley called Oyachi. Birches grew thick there, and below them was marsh full of reeds.

Just then a loud voice came up from the bottom of the valley:

"What fun!"

Everyone turned pale, they say, and ran.

* Yachi is Ainu for marsh. It is also yatsu, yato or ya, and appears in many place names everywhere.

Once, when this Yanosuke was staying in a hut deep in the mountains to gather mushrooms, in the middle of the night he heard a woman's scream far away, and his heart was troubled.

When he returned to the village, he learned that at the same hour that night, his younger sister had been killed by her son.

The sister lived alone with her son, but she and her daughter-in-law did not get along, and the daughter-in-law often went back to her parents' house and stayed away.

That day the daughter-in-law was lying down at home. Around noon the son suddenly said:

"I can't let Gaga [Mother] live any longer. Today I'll kill her."

And he took out a big grass sickle and began to grind it, scrape, scrape. It did not look like a joke at all. The mother begged his forgiveness desperately, but he would not listen. The daughter-in-law got up and tried to stop him in tears, but he paid no attention.

When he saw his mother trying to escape, he shut every door, front and back. When she said she needed to relieve herself, he brought a chamber pot from outside and said, "Use this."

By evening the mother had given up and crouched by the hearth, only weeping.

The son came up with the sharpened sickle and first slashed sideways at her left shoulder. But the tip caught on the drying rack above the hearth and did not cut deep. At that moment the mother let out the scream Yanosuke had heard deep in the mountains.

The second blow came down from her right shoulder. She was still breathing when the neighbors rushed in, seized the son and handed him over to the police. It was in the days when policemen still carried staves.

Seeing her son being led away, the mother said, from amid blood streaming like a waterfall:

"I will die without bearing him a grudge, so please forgive Magoshiro."

There was no one who heard this and was not moved.

Even as he was being taken away, Magoshiro brandished the sickle and chased the constables about, but he was judged insane and let go, returned home, and lives in the village to this day.

In Yamaguchi, Tsuchibuchi village, there is an old man named Nitta Otozo. The villagers call him Otoji, Grandpa Oto. He is close to ninety, ill and near death.

He knew the old days of Tono well and was always saying, "I want to tell someone," but he smelled so bad that no one would go near enough to listen. The stories of the lords of the various tate, the old fortified houses; the rise and fall of families; the songs sung in this land since ancient times; the legends of the deep mountains and the people who live there: this old man knew them all best.

* Sadly, Grandpa Oto died in early summer of the 42nd year of Meiji.

Grandpa Oto lived alone in the mountains for decades. He was born into a good family, but squandered his fortune as a young man, gave up on the world, built a hut at the top of a pass and lived by selling amazake, sweet sake, to passersby.

The packhorse drivers loved the old man like a father. Whenever he had a little money to spare, he went down to town to drink. He wore a short coat made from a red blanket and a red hood, and when he was drunk he danced his way home through the streets, and the police did not reprove him.

When he had grown very old, he returned to his home village and lives a lonely life. His children have all gone to Hokkaido, and he is alone.

Every hamlet has one old house without fail that worships a god called Okunai-sama. That house is called the daido.

The image of Okunai-sama is made by carving a piece of mulberry wood, drawing a face on it, and slipping over its head a square of cloth with a hole cut in the middle, for clothing. On the fifteenth day of the first month, everyone in the hamlet gathers at this house for its festival.

There is also a god called Oshira-sama. Its image is made the same way, and on the fifteenth of the first month too the villagers gather to worship it. At that time they sometimes paint the god's face with white powder.

The daido house always has a room only one tatami mat in size. Anyone who sleeps there always meets with strange happenings. Having one's pillow turned over is nothing unusual. One may be lifted up in someone's arms, or pushed out of the room. In any case, no one is allowed to sleep in peace.

* Oshira-sama is a god worshiped as a pair. Ezo Fuzoku Ibun shows that the Ainu have this god too.

* In the town of Kariwano in Akita, too, on the fifteenth of the first month, male and female images of the market god are painted with white powder for their festival. It is a very similar case.

Worshiping Okunai-sama brings much good fortune.

The Abe house, the choja of Kashiwazaki in Tsuchibuchi village, is called "the rice-field house" in the village. One year they were short of hands for rice planting and were grumbling, "The weather looks doubtful tomorrow, and are we going to leave a little unplanted?"

Then, from out of nowhere, a short little boy appeared and said, "Let me help too." When they set him to work, he disappeared at lunchtime, came back again before anyone knew it, and leveled the paddies well all day. Thanks to him, they finished planting that same day.

"We don't know where you're from, but please stay and have supper."

They invited him, but when the sun went down, he was nowhere to be seen.

When they returned to the house, there were many small muddy footprints on the veranda, leading into the inner room and stopping before the altar of Okunai-sama. Wondering, they opened the altar doors, and the god's image, they say, was covered with paddy mud from the waist down.

Many households also worship Konse-sama. Its sacred image closely resembles that of Okoma-sama, whose shrines are numerous in the villages. People offer phallic shapes carved in stone or wood, but nowadays this is done less and less.

In old houses there often lives a god called Zashiki-warashi. It usually takes the form of a child of twelve or thirteen and sometimes shows itself to people.

In the house of Imabuchi Kanjuro in Iide, Tsuchibuchi village, a daughter home on vacation from girls' high school ran into the Zashiki-warashi in the corridor and was badly startled. It was, she said, unmistakably a boy.

At the Sasaki house in Yamaguchi, in the same village, the mother was sewing alone when she heard paper rustling in the next room. It was the master's room, but the master had gone to Tokyo and was away. Thinking it strange, she slid open the wooden door, but no one was there. When she had sat for a while, she heard someone sniffling over and over. So it's the Zashiki-warashi, she thought. That this house had a Zashiki-warashi had long been well known.

A house where this god lives, they say, prospers and wants for nothing.

* Zashiki-warashi means "parlor children." There is an account of this god in Ishigami Mondo as well.

There are girl Zashiki-warashi too.

In the old Yamaguchi house of Yamaguchi Magozaemon, it had long been said that two girl gods lived.

One year, a man of the same village was on his way home from town when, near the bridge at Tomeba, he met two beautiful girls he had never seen. They were walking toward him, looking as if something weighed on their minds.

"Where have you come from?"

"We've come from Magozaemon's in Yamaguchi."

"And where are you going now?"

"To such-and-such a house in such-and-such a village."

That house was a wealthy farming family in a village some way off, prosperous to this day. The man thought, Magozaemon's house is finished.

Not long afterward, more than twenty people of Magozaemon's house, master and servants, were poisoned by mushrooms and all died in a single day. Only a girl of seven survived, but she too grew old without children and recently died of illness.

One day a great many unfamiliar mushrooms sprang up around the pear tree at Magozaemon's house. As the men debated whether to eat them, Magozaemon, who would be the last master of the house, said, "Leave them alone."

But one of the servants said:

"Any mushroom at all, if you put it in a water tub and stir it well with a hemp stalk before you eat it, will never poison you."

Everyone believed this, and the whole household ate them.

The seven-year-old girl was saved because she was so absorbed in playing outside that day that she forgot to come home for lunch.

While people were in confusion over the master's sudden death, relatives near and far came claiming money lent or promises made while he lived, and carried off the family's property down to the miso. It had been the choja house that first founded the village, but in a single night it vanished without a trace.

Before this misfortune there were various omens.

When the men went to rake out fodder they had cut, using a three-pronged hoe, a big snake came out. The master told them not to kill it, but they would not listen and beat it to death. Then, from under the fodder, countless snakes came writhing out. Half in sport, the men killed every one.

There was nowhere to throw them away, so they dug a pit outside the grounds, buried them and made a snake mound. They say there were so many snakes that no one could tell how many basketloads were carried.

Magozaemon was a rare scholar for the village, always sending to Kyoto for Japanese and Chinese books and losing himself in them. He was a somewhat odd man.

He decided to learn the art of befriending foxes to make his house rich. First he built an Inari shrine in his garden, then went up to Kyoto himself and obtained for it the highest rank, Shoichii. From then on, without missing a day, he offered a piece of fried tofu with his own hands and prayed. In time the fox grew tame and no longer fled when he came near; he could even reach out and hold it by the neck, they say.

The keeper of the village Yakushi hall used to joke, "Our Buddha gets no offerings at all, yet he does more good than Magozaemon's god."

When Mr. Sasaki's great-grandmother died in old age, she was laid in her coffin, and the relatives gathered and all slept in the parlor that night. Among them was the dead woman's daughter, who had been divorced because her mind was troubled.

In this region the fire must not be allowed to go out during mourning. So only the grandmother and the mother sat up, one on each side of the big hearth. The mother kept the charcoal basket beside her and added charcoal now and then.

Suddenly there were footsteps from the back door. They looked, and it was the old woman who had died. In life, being bent at the waist, her hem dragged, so she used to fold it up into a triangle and stitch it in front; she looked exactly so, and the striped pattern was familiar too.

Before they could cry out, the old woman passed beside the hearth where the two sat. Her hem brushed the charcoal basket, and the round basket spun round and round.

The mother was a strong-willed woman, and she turned and followed the figure with her eyes. Just as the old woman seemed to approach the parlor where the relatives slept, the troubled woman shrieked:

"Grandma's come!"

The sleepers woke at the cry, they say, and could only stare in astonishment.

* This calls to mind Maeterlinck's play The Intruder.

On the eve of the fourteenth day after the same woman's death, acquaintances gathered and chanted the nembutsu late into the night. When they were about to leave, there was an old woman sitting on the stone at the gate with her back to them. From behind, she was the dead woman herself.

So many saw her that no one doubted it. What she had left so unfinished, no one ever knew.

The old houses of the villages are called daido, it is said, because they came here from the province of Kai (Yamanashi Prefecture) in the first year of Daido (806). Daido was the era when Sakanoue no Tamuramaro campaigned against the Emishi. Kai, on the other hand, is the home province of the Nanbu family. Perhaps the two traditions have become mixed.

* Daido may be "daido," great hora. In the northeast, hora means a clan. The word horamae that appears later is the same.

When the ancestors of the daido first arrived here, it was just at the end of the year. They had put up only one of the pair of New Year gate pines when New Year's Day arrived.

So even today, as an auspicious custom, these houses lay one of the gate pines on the ground and stretch the sacred rope across that way, they say.

The Abe family of Kashiwazaki, "the rice-field house," is an especially well-known old family. In the previous generation there was a skilled carver, and many of the images of gods and Buddhas throughout Tono are his work.

The Hei River flows out from Hayachine and empties into the sea at Miyako to the northeast.

In the town of Tono there is a house now called Ike-no-hata, "the edge of the pond." When its master of the previous generation was coming home from Miyako, passing near the Haradai pool on the Hei River, a young woman asked him to carry a letter.

"Go to the marsh halfway up Monomiyama, behind the town of Tono, and clap your hands. The person it is addressed to will come out."

He agreed, but along the way it kept troubling him. As he walked on, uncertain, he met a rokubu, a wandering pilgrim. The pilgrim opened the letter, read it and said:

"If you take this, a great disaster will fall on you. Let me rewrite it."

And he gave him a different letter.

He took it to the marsh and clapped his hands, and sure enough a young woman came out and took the letter. As thanks she gave him a very small stone hand mill. Put in a single grain of rice and turn it, and gold came out underneath.

Thanks to this treasure, the house gradually grew rich. But his wife grew greedy and put in a whole handful of rice at once. The mill began to spin round and round by itself, slid into a small hollow where the water the master offered every morning had collected, and vanished.

The hollow later became a small pond, which is still beside the house. That, they say, is where the house's name Ike-no-hata comes from.

* There are stories like this in the West too. Is it only coincidence?

The first to make a trail up Hayachine was a hunter of Tsukimoushi village, after the Nanbu family came to Tono. Before that, they say, not one local person had ever entered the mountain.

When the hunter had opened about half the trail and was living in a makeshift hut halfway up, one day he was toasting rice cakes on the hearth and eating them when someone passed outside the hut and kept peering in. He looked, and it was a huge priest.

The priest came into the hut and watched the cakes toasting with great curiosity, until at last he could not help himself, reached out and ate one. The hunter was afraid too, so he offered him cakes himself, and the priest happily ate again. When the cakes were gone, he left.

He would surely come again tomorrow. The hunter put two or three white stones, very like rice cakes, among the cakes on the hearth. The stones grew as hot as fire.

As expected, the priest came that day too and ate the cakes as he had the day before. When the cakes were gone, he popped the white stones into his mouth the same way. At once the priest leaped up, dashed out of the hut and vanished.

Later, they say, the priest was found dead at the bottom of a valley.

* A great flood on the Kitakami River long ago is called the "white-hair water." It is said to have been a curse for tricking a white-haired old woman into eating hot stones that looked like rice cakes. It closely resembles this story.

Mount Keito is a steep peak rising in front of Hayachine; the villages at its foot also call it Mae-yakushi. Tengu are said to live there, and even those who climb Hayachine never set foot on this mountain.

The master of a house called Haneto in Yamaguchi was a childhood friend of Mr. Sasaki's grandfather and a reckless fellow. He was always doing rough things, like mowing grass with an axe and digging earth with a sickle.

Once, on a bet with someone, he climbed Mae-yakushi alone. When he came back, he said:

At the summit was a great rock, and on it were three giants. Before them they had spread mountains of gold and silver. When they noticed him, they turned with fierce faces. The glare of their eyes was terrible beyond words.

"I meant to climb Hayachine, but I lost my way and came here," he said.

At that the giants said, "Then we'll see you off," and went ahead of him. When they were near the foot of the mountain, they said, "Close your eyes." He did as he was told and stood there a while, and before he knew it, the giants were gone.

One day a man of Okuni village went to Hayachine to cut bamboo, and among the thick dwarf bamboo a giant lay asleep. He had taken off his straw sandals, woven of dwarf bamboo and fully three shaku (about ninety centimeters) long, and set them side by side, and he lay on his back, snoring loudly.

* Dwarf bamboo is a low bamboo that grows deep in the mountains.

Every year many children of the houses of Tono are carried off by strangers from the mountains. Especially girls, they say.

Deep in Mount Senba there is a marsh. The valley gives off a strong, foul, fishy smell, and almost no one who has gone in has come back.

Long ago there was a hunter called So-and-so Hayato; his descendants are still living. He found a white deer and pursued it, staying a thousand nights in this valley. That became the mountain's name, "a thousand nights."

The white deer was shot and fled, and on the next mountain it broke a leg. That mountain is now called Katabane, "one wing." The deer came back to the first mountain and at last died. The place is called Shisuke. The deer, they say, is the white deer worshiped as Shisuke Gongen.

* It is like reading an ancient fudoki, a provincial gazetteer.

When you stay overnight on Mount Shiromi, sometimes in the middle of the night everything around grows faintly bright. People who stay on the mountain in autumn to gather mushrooms often meet with this. Sometimes they also hear, across the valley, the sound of great trees being felled, and singing.

The vastness of this mountain is beyond measure. When people go to cut thatch grass in May, they see in the distance a mountain covered in paulownia blossoms, like a trailing purple cloud. But no one can ever reach it.

Once a mushroom gatherer found, deep in Shiromi, a golden trough and a golden ladle. He tried to carry them home, but they were too heavy to move. He tried to shave off a corner with his sickle, but could not. Meaning to come back, he stripped the bark from a nearby tree to leave a white mark. But the next day, when he brought companions to look, they could not find even the tree.

Along the ridge from Shiromi there is a place called Hanaremori. A part of it called Choja-yashiki, "the rich man's mansion," is completely uninhabited.

Someone was making charcoal there. One night, someone lifted the straw mat that hung over the doorway of his hut and peered in. It was a woman with her long hair parted in two and hanging down.

In this area, hearing a woman's scream in the middle of the night is not unusual.

On a night when the younger brother of Mr. Sasaki's grandfather was staying on Shiromi to gather mushrooms, he saw a woman running across in front of a great forest on the far side of the valley. She seemed to be running through the air.

He heard a voice calling, "Wait!" twice, they say.

The futtachi of monkeys and the futtachi of oinu are fearsome things. A futtachi is a beast that has grown old and gained uncanny powers; oinu are wolves.

Mount Futatsuishi, near Yamaguchi village, is a rocky mountain. One rainy day a child coming home from elementary school looked up at the mountain and saw wolves crouching on rocks here and there. Soon they began to howl in turn, thrusting their heads upward from below.

From the front they look as big as newborn colts. From behind, they say, they are surprisingly small.

Nothing is so dreadful and frightening as the howling of wolves.

Between Sakaigi Pass and Wayama Pass, the men who led packhorses used to meet wolves often in the old days.

When traveling by night, the drivers usually went in groups of about ten. Each led five or six or seven horses, so there were always forty or fifty horses.

Once two or three hundred wolves came after them. The mountain rang with the sound of their feet. In terror, men and horses gathered in one place and lit fires all around to protect themselves. Even so, the wolves leaped over the fires and came in.

At last they untied the horses' ropes and stretched them all the way around. Then, perhaps taking it for a pitfall or some trap, the wolves no longer leaped in. They surrounded them at a distance and kept howling until dawn, they say.

The master of an old family in Tomo village, an old man still in good health, was on his way home from town when he heard wolves howling again and again. He was drunk, and for fun he howled back in imitation. Then the wolves seemed to follow him, howling as they came.

Frightened, he hurried home, shut the doors tight and hid, but the wolves circled the house howling all night long.

When dawn came and he looked, the wolves had dug in under the foundation of the stable and killed all seven horses, every one. From about that time, they say, the family's fortunes declined somewhat.

When Mr. Sasaki was small, he was coming home from the mountains with his grandfather when they found a big deer lying on the bank of a stream near the village. Its side was torn open, and perhaps it had only just been killed, for it was still steaming.

"Wolves have eaten this," his grandfather said. "I'd like the hide, but the wolves are surely hiding nearby, watching, so we can't take it."

Once the grass has grown three sun (about nine centimeters), they say, a wolf can hide in it. The color of a wolf's coat changes with the seasons, following the changing colors of the grass and trees.

One year Sasaki Kahei of Wano went hunting at Oyachi over Sakaigi, a stretch of open land running on from Shisuke. It was the end of autumn; the leaves had all fallen and the mountainsides were bare.

From the far ridge, a pack of wolves, who knew how many hundreds, came running toward him. In terror he climbed to the top of a tree, and right beneath it they raced past with a sound of feet like an earthquake and went off to the north.

From about that time, they say, wolves became far fewer in Tono.

At the foot of Mount Rokkoushi are broad grassy slopes called Obaya, Itagoya and so on. People from the villages come there to cut thatch grass.

One autumn, people of Iide village were cutting grass when they found three wolf cubs in a cave in the rocks. They killed two and carried one home. From that day the wolves began attacking only the horses of Iide. They never touched the people or horses of any other village.

The people of Iide talked it over and decided to hunt the wolves. Among them were sumo wrestlers who had always been proud of their strength.

When they went out into the fields, the male wolf stayed far off and would not come near. A female leaped at a man named Tetsu. Tetsu took off his wapporo, his short coat, wrapped it around his arm, and thrust it straight into the wolf's mouth. The wolf bit down on it. Pushing it in deeper, Tetsu called for help, but everyone was afraid and no one came near.

Before long Tetsu's arm went down into the wolf's belly, and the wolf in its agony bit through the bones of his arm. The wolf died on the spot. Tetsu was carried home but died soon after.

This story was also printed in the Tono Shimbun the year before last.

A man named Kuma, "Bear," of Kamigo village went hunting on Mount Rokkoushi with a friend on a snowy day. Deep in a valley they found bear tracks and split up to follow them.

As Kuma made his way toward the ridge, a big bear was glaring at him from behind a rock. It was too close to shoot. Kuma threw down his gun and grappled with the bear, and together they rolled over the snow and fell into the valley. His companion tried to help but could do nothing.

At last the two bears, or rather the man and the bear, fell into the stream, and Kuma the man went under, beneath. In that moment his companion shot the bear dead.

Kuma the man did not drown; he had only a few wounds from the claws, and his life was in no danger.

On the ridge running from Mount Rokkoushi, in the mountains above a village called Hashino, there is a gold mine. There was a man who made charcoal for the mine. He too was a master of the flute.

One noon he was lying on his back in his hut playing the flute when someone lifted the mat at the doorway. Startled, he looked, and it was a monkey futtachi. When he sprang up in alarm, the monkey ambled off.

A monkey futtachi looks much like a man, is fond of women, and often carries off women from the villages. It smears pine resin on its fur and coats it with sand, so that its hide is like armor, and not even a gun's bullet can pierce it.

This is the story of a man of Hayashizaki in Tochinai village, now nearly fifty. More than ten years ago he went to Mount Rokkoushi to shoot deer and was blowing a deer call, an oki.

Then a monkey futtachi, perhaps taking him for a real deer, came down from the ridge, parting the dwarf bamboo with its hands, its great mouth open. Terrified, he stopped blowing, and the monkey veered off and ran down toward the valley.

In this region, to frighten children, people often say, "The monkey futtachi of Rokkoushi is coming!" There are many monkeys on that mountain. When you go to see the Ogase waterfall, there are many monkeys in the trees on the cliffs, and when they see people they run off, throwing nuts and such at them.

There are many monkeys on Sennin Pass too, and they play tricks on travelers, throwing stones at them and so on.

Sennin Pass is fifteen ri going up and fifteen ri going down. Halfway along stands a hall where an image of a sennin, a mountain immortal, is enshrined.

It has long been the custom for travelers to write on the walls of this hall the strange things they met with on the mountain. For example:

"I am from Echigo. On the night of such-and-such a day of such-and-such a month, on this mountain road, I met a young woman with her hair hanging loose. She looked at me and smiled."

Others have written, "Here I was tormented by monkeys," "I met three bandits," and so on.

* This ri, too, is the small ri (one ri = about 600 meters).

On the mountain of Shisuke grow kakko flowers, rare even in Tono. In May, when the kankodori, the cuckoo, calls, women and children go into the mountains to pick them. Soaked in vinegar they turn purple, and people blow on them to make a sound, as with ground cherries.

Going to pick these flowers is the young people's greatest pleasure.

There are many kinds of birds in the mountains, but the one with the loneliest cry is the otto bird. It calls in the middle of summer nights. People carrying loads over the pass from Otsuchi on the coast hear its voice, they say, from far down at the bottom of the valley.

Long ago a rich man's daughter became close to the son of another rich man, and the two went to play in the mountains. But at some point the young man could no longer be seen. The girl searched from dusk into the night but could not find him, and at last she became this bird.

When it cries "Ottoon, ottoon," it is calling for its otto, its husband. The end of the cry is hoarse, a pitiful sound.

The horse-driving bird looks like a hototogisu but is a little larger, its wings reddish brown, with stripes on its shoulders like a horse's reins. On its breast is a pattern like the net bag fitted over a horse's muzzle.

This too was once a servant of a rich man's house who went to turn the horses out on the mountain. When he was about to come home, one horse was missing. He searched all night and could not find it, and at last he became this bird.

Its cry, "Aaho, aaho," is the call used in this region when driving horses in the fields.

A year when the horse-driving bird comes down to the village to call is said to be a sign of famine. Usually it lives deep in the mountains, where its voice can be heard.

The cuckoo and the hototogisu were sisters long ago. The cuckoo was the elder.

Once the elder sister dug up potatoes and roasted them, ate the hard outer parts herself and gave the soft insides to her younger sister. But the younger sister thought the part her sister was eating must be tastier, and she killed her sister with a kitchen knife.

At once the elder sister became a bird and flew away crying, "Ganko, ganko." Ganko means "the hard part" in the local dialect.

The younger sister realized that her sister had been giving her all the best parts, and her remorse knew no end; in time she too became a bird and cried, "Hocho kaketa," "I used the knife."

That is why in Tono the hototogisu is called hocho-kake. Around Morioka, they say, the hototogisu cries, "Docha e tonde ta?", "Where did she fly?"

* These potatoes are white potatoes.

The Hei River has many deep pools, and no lack of frightening legends.

There was a servant in the house of a rich man of Kawai village, near where the Okuni River joins it. He was cutting trees on the mountain above a certain pool and dropped his axe into it. Since it was his master's, he dived into the pool to look for it, and as he went toward the bottom he began to hear sounds.

Following the sounds, he found a house behind a rock, and inside a beautiful girl was weaving at a loom. Beside the loom leaned that axe.

"Please give me back that axe."

When he said this, the girl turned, and her face was that of his master's daughter, who had died two or three years before.

"I will give back the axe. But tell no one that I am here. In return, I will make your life easy, so you won't have to be a servant."

Whether thanks to her or not, the man began to win at gambling with uncanny luck, saved money, and before long left service and became a farmer of some standing.

The man forgot all about it and gave no thought to the girl's words. One day, passing by the same pool on his way to town, he suddenly remembered the old days and told his companion, "Something like this happened to me once." The story spread at once through the nearby villages.

From about then the man's house declined again, and in the end he went back to his old master and served him until he was old.

What the master's family were thinking no one knows, but they poured pot after pot of boiling water into the pool. It had no effect at all, they say.

* Kawai probably means kawaai, "where rivers meet."

There are many kappa in the rivers. The Sarugaishi River has especially many.

At the "riverside house" in Matsuzaki village, women in two successive generations became pregnant with kappa children. The children they bore were cut to pieces, put into a one-sho cask and buried in the ground. They were ugly and grotesque.

The husband's family home was another "riverside house," in Nibari village, and its master told people what had happened.

One day the whole family had gone out to the fields, and when they were about to come home in the evening, the woman was crouching at the water's edge, grinning. The next day, during the midday rest, the same thing happened.

As this went on, rumor spread that some man of the village was visiting the woman every night. At first it was only when her husband was away carrying loads to the coast, but later it came even on nights when she slept beside her husband.

It must be a kappa, the rumor grew. The family gathered to keep watch, but it was no use. The husband's mother even slept beside her. In the middle of the night she heard the young woman laughing, and though she knew it had come, she could not move.

The birth was very hard, but someone said, "Fill a horse's feed trough with water and give birth in it, and it will be easy," and when they tried it, it was so. The child that was born had webbed hands.

The young woman's mother, too, is said to have once borne a kappa's child. Some say the bond goes back more than two or three generations.

This family, too, is quite distinguished, of samurai descent. One of them has served on the village council.

In a house in Kamigo village too, a child that seemed to be a kappa's was once born. There was no clear proof, but it was bright red all over, with a big mouth, a truly unpleasant child.

Since it was ill-omened, they decided to abandon it and took it to a fork in the road and left it there. When the man had gone about one ken away, he suddenly thought better of it.

"What a waste. I could have sold it to a sideshow for money."

He went back, but someone had already taken it, they say, for there was no trace of it.

Finding kappa footprints on the sand of a riverbank is not at all unusual. They are seen especially often on the day after rain.

Like a monkey's foot, the big toe is set apart, and the print resembles a human hand. It is less than three sun (about nine centimeters) long. The marks of the fingertips, they say, are not as clear as a human's.

Near the Obako pool on the Kogarase River there is a house called "the new house."

One day they sent the horse to the pool to cool off, and while the boy leading it had gone off to play, a kappa came out and tried to drag the horse into the pool. Instead it was dragged by the horse all the way to the stable door, and it hid under the feed trough.

The family thought it odd that the trough was turned over, and when they lifted it a little, a kappa's hand shot out.

The whole village gathered and debated whether to kill it or let it go. In the end they made it swear solemnly never again to trouble the village horses, and let it go.

That kappa left the village, and they say it now lives in the pool of the waterfall at Aizawa.

* Stories of exactly this type abound all over the country. Wherever kappa are said to live, this story is sure to be found. Why should that be?

In other regions kappa are said to have blue faces, but the kappa of Tono have red faces.

When Mr. Sasaki's great-grandmother was a little girl playing in the garden with her friends, a boy with a bright red face was peering at them from between the three walnut trees. That, they say, was a kappa.

Those walnut trees are still there, grown huge. The grounds of this house are surrounded by walnut trees.

Old Kahei of Wano village was hiding in a pheasant blind waiting for pheasants, but a fox kept coming out and chasing them away. It was so hateful that he aimed to shoot it, but the fox turned toward him with an unconcerned look.

He pulled the trigger, but it would not fire. Feeling uneasy, he examined the gun and found it had somehow been packed solid with earth, from the muzzle to the breech.

The same Kahei met a white deer on Mount Rokkoushi. White deer are said to be messengers of the gods. He hesitated: if he wounded it and failed to kill it, he would surely be cursed.

But he was a famous hunter and did not want to be laughed at, so he steeled himself and fired. He felt the shot strike, yet the deer did not move at all.

Again he felt uneasy. He took out the golden bullet he kept to ward off evil in an emergency, wrapped it in mugwort and fired. Still the deer did not move.

It was so strange that he went up to it, and it was a white stone shaped very like a deer.

He had lived in the mountains for decades and could never mistake a stone for a deer. This was surely the work of some demon. That once, they say, he thought of giving up hunting.

Another time, the same Kahei had no time to build a hut in the mountains one night and decided to spend it at the foot of a great tree. He stretched a sanzu rope against evil three times around himself and the tree, and dozed with his gun in his arms.

Late at night he noticed a sound and looked up: something in the shape of a great priest, flapping its red robe like wings, came swooping down over the top of the tree.

He fired at once, and the priest flapped again and flew away into the sky.

The terror of that time was no ordinary thing either. Three times he met with such wonders, and each time he swore to give up hunting and made vows to the village god. Yet each time he changed his mind again and could not give up hunting until he was old. So Kahei often told people.

The Miura family of Okuni is the richest in the village. Two or three generations ago, in the master's time, they were still poor. His wife was somewhat absent-minded.

One day the wife went along the stream that flowed past their gate to gather butterbur. Good butterbur was scarce, so she went farther and farther up the valley.

Suddenly she saw a fine house with a black gate. Wondering at it, she went through the gate and found a wide garden full of red and white flowers, with many chickens running about. Going round to the back, she found many cows in the cowshed and many horses in the stable. But there was no one to be seen.

She stepped up through the entrance and found, in the next room, many trays and bowls of red and black lacquer set out. In the inner parlor, an iron kettle on the brazier was boiling and hissing. Still there was no one.

Could this be the house of a mountain man? Suddenly frightened, she ran all the way home.

When she told people about it, no one believed her.

But one day, as the wife was washing things at the kado, the washing place by the stream, a red bowl came floating down from upstream. It was so lovely that she picked it up, but if she used it for eating, she might be scolded for its being dirty. So she put it in the rice chest and used it to measure grain.

From the time she began measuring with this bowl, the grain never ran out, no matter how long. When the family wondered at it and asked her, the wife at last told them she had picked it up in the stream.

From then on the family's fortune turned, and it became the Miura family of today.

In Tono, a strange house in the mountains is called a mayoiga. Whoever comes upon a mayoiga should always take something home, a utensil or an animal from the house. For the house shows itself in order to give it to that person.

This wife had no greed and brought nothing back. That is why, they say, the bowl came floating to her of its own accord.

* Kado here is not "gate" but kawado, a place each household made on the riverbank in front of the gate for drawing water and washing.

* In the original, kesene means grain such as rice or millet, and kitsu the chest that holds it.

Kanazawa village lies at the foot of Shiromi, one of the most remote mountain places in Kamihei district, and few people come and go.

Six or seven years ago, a man from this village married into a family at Yamazaki in Tochinai village. On his way to visit his family home, this son-in-law lost his way on a mountain road and came upon that mayoiga again.

The look of the house, the many cows and horses and chickens, the red and white flowers: everything was just as in the earlier story. Going in at the entrance, he found a room with trays and bowls set out. In the parlor the iron kettle was boiling, as if someone were just about to make tea. He even sensed someone standing somewhere near the toilet.

The son-in-law stood dazed, then grew more and more frightened, turned back, and at last came out at the village of Okuni.

No one in Okuni believed the story, but the family at Yamazaki was different.

"That must be a mayoiga. Let's go and bring back the trays and bowls and become rich."

With the son-in-law in the lead, a crowd of them went deep into the mountains to search. They came to the spot where he said, "The gate was here," but found nothing, and came back empty-handed.

Nor have I heard that the son-in-law ever became rich.

Hayachine is a mountain of granite. Halfway up the steep cliffs on the Okuni side is a rock called Abe-ga-jo, Abe Castle. It is a place no one can get near.

It is said that the mother of Abe no Sadato still lives there. On evenings when rain is coming, they say, the sound of the door of the rock cave being shut can be heard. The people of Okuni and Tsukimoushi say, "The lock at Abe Castle is sounding. It'll rain tomorrow."

※ Abe no Sadato was the head of a powerful clan that ruled this region in the late Heian period; he was defeated by Minamoto no Yoriyoshi and Yoshiie (Hachiman Taro) in the Former Nine Years' War.

On the same Hayachine, at the trailhead on the Tsukimoushi side, there is also a rock cave called Abe-yashiki, the Abe mansion. In any case, Hayachine is a mountain closely tied to Abe no Sadato.

At the trailhead from Okuni there are also some three mounds where, they say, retainers of Hachiman Taro (Minamoto no Yoshiie) who fell in battle are buried.

There are many other legends of Abe no Sadato.

On the border between Tsuchibuchi village and Kurihashi village (formerly Hashino), in the mountains two or three ri up from Yamaguchi, there is a broad, flat moor. A spot there is called Sadato. There is a marsh, said to be where Sadato cooled his horses. It is also said to be the site of Sadato's camp. The view is fine, and the eastern coast can be seen clearly.

In Tsuchibuchi village there is an Abe family said to be descended from Sadato. It was once a flourishing house, and even now its grounds are surrounded by a moat full of water. Many swords and pieces of horse gear have been handed down. The head of the house is Abe Yoemon; he is still the second or third richest man in the village, and a member of the village council.

There are many other descendants of the Abe, including some near the Abe-date in Morioka, beside the Kuriyagawa stockade, Sadato's last stronghold.

Four or five cho north of the Abe house in Tsuchibuchi, where the Kogarase River bends, are the remains of a fortified house. It is called the Hachimanzawa tate and is said to have been Hachiman Taro's camp.

On the way from here to the town of Tono is a mountain called Hachimanyama, and on the ridge facing the Hachimanzawa tate are the remains of another tate. This one, they say, was Sadato's camp. The two are a little over twenty cho apart. It is said they fought here, shooting arrows at each other, and in fact many arrowheads have been dug up.

Between them lies a hamlet called Nitakai. At the time of the war this area was thick with reeds, and the ground had not yet firmed and swayed underfoot.

Once, when Hachiman Taro passed this way, a great deal of rice gruel had been left there, provisions of one side or the other. He asked, "Nitakai?", "Is it cooked?", and that became the name of the village.

The stream that flows outside Nitakai is called the Narukawa, and beyond it is Ashiaraigawa village, "foot-washing river." It got its name, they say, because Yoshiie washed his feet in the Narukawa.

* Nitakai probably comes from the Ainu nitato, meaning marsh. It suits the lay of the land well. Nita and nuta in western Japan are the same.

There are now two houses called daido in Tsuchibuchi village. The head of the daido of Yamaguchi is called Ohora Mannojo. His adoptive mother, Ohide, is past eighty and still well; she is the elder sister of Mr. Sasaki's grandmother.

She was versed in magic and could kill snakes with spells or bring down birds perched in trees. Mr. Sasaki was often shown such things, he says.

On the fifteenth day of the first month of the old calendar last year, this old woman told this story:

Long ago, in a certain place, there was a poor farmer. He had no wife, but he had a beautiful daughter. He also kept a horse.

The daughter loved this horse; at night she went to the stable and slept with it, and at last she and the horse became husband and wife.

One night her father found out. The next day, without a word to his daughter, he led the horse out, hanged it from a mulberry tree and killed it.

That night, finding the horse gone, the daughter asked her father and learned what had happened. Shocked and grieving, she ran to the mulberry tree, clung to the dead horse's neck and wept.

Her father hated to see it, and with an axe he cut off the horse's head from behind. At once the daughter, still clinging to the head, rose up into the heavens.

Oshira-sama is the god that came into being at that moment.

From the branches of the mulberry on which the horse was hanged, three images of the god were made. The one made from the base is the elder sister god, kept at the daido of Yamaguchi. The one made from the middle was at the house of Zaike Gonjuro in Yamazaki, where an aunt of Mr. Sasaki's married; that line has now died out, and no one knows where the image went. The younger sister god, made from the tip, is now in Tsukimoushi village, they say.

According to the same old woman, Okunai-sama is a god always found together with Oshira-sama in houses that have Oshira-sama. But there are also houses with Okunai-sama alone and no Oshira-sama. The images differ from house to house too.

The Okunai-sama of the daido of Yamaguchi is a wooden image; that of the house of Haneishi Tanie in Yamaguchi is a hanging scroll; that of "the rice-field house" is a wooden image. The daido of Iide, they say, has no Oshira-sama, only Okunai-sama.

The old woman who told this story is a devout follower of the nembutsu, but she holds something different from the ordinary nembutsu, a kind of hidden faith.

She passes the teachings on to believers, but they all keep it strictly secret and never reveal its practices to anyone, not even parents or children. It has nothing to do with temples or priests; it is a gathering of lay people only, and not many of them. A woman named Haneishi Tanie is also one of them.

On Amida's feast day, they wait in the middle of the night until everyone is asleep, then gather and pray in a hidden room. Because they are versed in magic and spells, the villagers treat them with respect.

Kotobata in Tochinai village is a hamlet of about five houses in a deep mountain ravine, at the source of a tributary of the Kogarase River. It is a full two ri from the houses of Tochinai.

At the entrance to Kotobata there is a mound, and on it a seated wooden figure about the size of a person. It used to be in a hall, but now it stands exposed to the rain. It is called Kakura-sama.

The village children use it as a toy, pulling it out and throwing it in the river or dragging it along the road, so that now its nose and mouth can no longer be made out. If you scold the children to make them stop, they say, you may instead be cursed and fall ill.

* There are many other examples of images of gods and Buddhas that like to play with children and grow angry if this is stopped: the Yakushi Buddha of Tokoji in Oike village, Totomi (Shizuoka Prefecture); the god of the Gunjinbo shrine in Toyoda village, Suruga (Shizuoka Prefecture); the wooden Buddha of the Amida hall at Ite in Shinano (Nagano Prefecture); and others.

Wooden images of Kakura-sama are found all over Tono. There is one at Nishiuchi in Tochinai, and some remember that there was one at Ohora in Yamaguchi too.

No one worships Kakura-sama. The carving is crude, and the clothes and headdress cannot be made out clearly.

The Kakura-sama of Tochinai are the two, large and small, mentioned before. In all of Tsuchibuchi village there are three or four. All are wooden half-length figures, misshapen things roughly hacked out with a hatchet, yet one can tell they are human faces.

Kakura-sama was originally the name of a place where the gods rested on their journeys. It became the name of the god always present there.

At Choja-yashiki in Hanare-mori, until a few years ago, there was a workshop making matchsticks.

At night a woman would creep up to the door of the hut and laugh shrilly at the people she saw. Unable to bear the eeriness of it, they finally moved the workshop to Yamaguchi.

Later, someone built a hut on the same mountain to cut railway sleepers. But in the evenings the laborers would often wander off somewhere in a daze, and when they came back they were dull and vacant. There were four or five such laborers, and they kept wandering off after that too.

Asked about it afterward, they said a woman came and led them away. For two or three days after they returned, they remembered nothing.

Choja-yashiki is said to be the site where a rich man, a choja, once lived, and nearby is a mountain called Nukamori, "bran hill." It is said the bran thrown out by the rich man's house piled up into a hill.

On this mountain grows an utsugi bush with five leaves, and gold is said to be buried beneath it. Even now people sometimes go looking for that utsugi.

Might this rich man have been a gold miner of old? There is slag from iron smelting around here, and the Ontoku gold mine is not far off along the same range.

* The bran mounds and sukumo mounds of various places almost all have rich-man legends like this one. Legends of buried gold are countless throughout the country.

Tajiri Chosaburo of Yamaguchi is the richest man in Tsuchibuchi village. This is a story from when the old head of that house was in his early forties.

Old Ohide's son had died, and on the night of the funeral, after the nembutsu was over and everyone had gone home, he, who loved to talk, went out a little later than the others.

There a man lay on his back, his head pillowed on the stone that catches the drips from the eaves. He was a stranger, and he seemed to be dead. Seen by moonlight, his knees were drawn up and his mouth was open.

Being a bold man, he shook him with his foot, but the man did not stir. He was blocking the way, and there was nowhere else to pass, so at last he stepped over him and went home.

The next morning he went to look, and of course there was no trace. No one else had seen it either. Yet the stone the man had used as a pillow was exactly as he had seen it the night before, in shape and in place.

"I should have touched him with my hand. I was half afraid, so I only poked him with my foot, and I have no idea what it was."

So the man said.

Another story from the same man. Chozo of Yamaguchi, who worked as a servant in this house, is past seventy and still well.

When he was young, coming home late one night from carousing, he met someone coming from the direction of the coast in front of his master's gate, which faces the Otsuchi road. The person wore a snow cape. When Chozo came near, the person stopped, and as Chozo looked at him suspiciously, he slipped smoothly away toward the field across the road.

But there was a fence there, Chozo thought, and when he looked closely the fence was certainly there. Suddenly frightened, he rushed into the house and told his master.

He heard afterward that at just about the same time, a man of Nibari village had fallen from his horse and died on his way back from the coast.

This Chozo's father was also named Chozo. The family had served the Tajiri house for generations, husband and wife together.

When he was young, coming home from carousing while it was still early in the evening, he went through the gate and saw a figure standing in the horamae. Its hands were tucked into its kimono, the cuffs of its narrow sleeves hanging, and its face was too dim to see.

His wife was named Otsune. A man come creeping in to visit Otsune, he thought, and strode toward him. But the figure did not flee toward the back; it moved toward the entrance on the right. Making a fool of me, he thought angrily, and pressed closer, and the figure, hands still in its kimono, backed away and slipped smoothly in through the gap of about three sun in the entrance door.

Even then Chozo thought nothing strange of it and put his hand through the gap to feel inside. The paper door inside was shut tight.

Only then did a chill run through him. He stepped back and looked up, and the man was pressed flat against the kumokabe above the entrance, looking down at him. Its head hung low, almost touching Chozo's head. Its eyeballs seemed to stick out a full foot, he said.

That time it was only frightening; it was not an omen of anything.

* The kumokabe is the wall above the nageshi, the horizontal beam.

[Figure: floor plan of the Tajiri house (plate in the original omitted)]

To make the stories so far clear, the floor plan of the Tajiri house needs to be shown in a figure. Houses in Tono are all built much like this one.

In this house the gate faces north, but usually it faces east. The gate is called jomae. Around the house are fields; no fences or walls are built.

Between the master's bedroom and the family's living room, the uchi, there is a small dark room called the zato room. In the old days, whenever a house held a banquet, it always called in a zato, a blind entertainer. This is the room where the zato was made to wait.

* What strikes one most when traveling in this region is that every house is an L-shaped magariya, a "bent house." This house is a good example.

At Nozaki in Tochinai there was a man named Maekawa Mankichi. He died two or three years ago, a little past thirty.

Two or three years before his death, coming home from carousing, he went through the gate and along the veranda to the corner. It was a moonlit night in June. Glancing up at the kumokabe without thinking, he saw a man lying there pressed flat against it. His face was deathly pale.

Mankichi was so shocked that he took to his bed, but this too was not an omen of anything. Marukichi, son of the Tajiri house, was close to this man and heard the story from him.

[Figure: the joi of the Tajiri house (plate in the original omitted)]

This is something Tajiri Marukichi experienced himself.

As a boy, one night he got up from the living room to go to the toilet, and when he entered the tea room, a person was standing at the boundary with the parlor. Though faintly hazy, the stripes of the kimono and the eyes and nose could be clearly seen, and the hair hung loose.

He was frightened, but he reached out and felt there. His hand struck the wooden door with a clatter and touched the door's crosspiece too. Yet he could not see his own hand; over it lay the shape of a person, like a shadow. When he put his hand where the face was, he saw the face on top of his hand.

He went back to the living room and told everyone, and when they took a lantern and went to look, nothing was there anymore.

Marukichi is a clever man with modern ideas, and not one to tell lies.

The house of the daido of Yamaguchi, Ohora Mannojo, is built a little differently from other houses. The entrance faces southeast. It is a very old house.

In this house there is a wicker basket of old documents that has never once been opened, because it is said a curse will fall on anyone who takes them out to look.

[Figure: floor plan of the Ohora house (plate in the original omitted)]

Mr. Sasaki's grandfather died three or four years ago at about seventy. His youth would have been in the Kaei era (1848–54).

In those days many Westerners came to live in the coastal districts. There were Western-style buildings in both Kamaishi and Yamada, and Westerners once lived at the tip of the Funakoshi peninsula too.

Christianity was practiced in secret, and in Tono too there were people crucified for believing in it.

There are old men who still repeat what people who went to the coast told them: "Foreigners are always hugging and licking each other." In the coastal districts, they say, there were also quite a few children of mixed blood.

At Kashiwazaki in Tsuchibuchi village there is a house where, though both parents are Japanese beyond any doubt, there are two albino children. Their hair, skin and eyes are just like a Westerner's. They must be about twenty-six or twenty-seven now. They farm at home. Their voices, too, are unlike those of local people, thin and high.

The center of Tsuchibuchi village, where the village office and the primary school are, is called Motojuku. A man named Masa who runs a tofu shop there must now be thirty-six or thirty-seven.

When Masa's father was gravely ill and close to death, a house was being built in Shimo-Tochinai across the Kogarase River, and they were pounding the ground to firm the foundation. That evening Masa's father came alone, greeted everyone and said, "I'll do some pounding too." He joined the others and worked for a while, and when it had grown a little dark, he went home with everyone.

Wasn't he supposed to be gravely ill? people wondered a little afterward. Later they heard he had died that day.

When they went to offer condolences and mentioned what had happened in the daytime, that hour was just when the sick man had been about to breathe his last.

I have forgotten his name, but this happened when the master of a wealthy house in the town of Tono was gravely ill, hovering between life and death. One day he dropped in at his family temple.

The priest received him courteously and offered him tea. They chatted for a while and then he left, but something about him seemed odd. The priest had his acolyte follow him, and he went out the gate toward his house, turned a corner in the town and was gone.

Others too met this man on that road. He greeted everyone properly and seemed no different from usual.

But he died that night. Of course, at that time he was in no condition to go out.

Afterward, at the temple, they wondered whether he had drunk the tea and looked where he had set his cup down: it had all been poured into the seam between the tatami mats.

This is a similar story.

Jokenji in Tsuchibuchi village is a temple of the Soto Zen school, the head of the twelve temples of Tono.

One evening a man of the village met an old man on the road coming from Motojuku. The old man had long been gravely ill, so he asked, "When did you get better?" and the old man said, "I've been feeling well for two or three days, so today I'm going to the temple to hear a sermon." They spoke again at the temple gate and parted.

At Jokenji the priest welcomed the old man and offered him tea; they talked for a while and the old man left. Again an acolyte was sent to see where he went, and he vanished outside the gate, so the startled acolyte told the priest.

When they looked, the tea had again been poured into a gap in the tatami. The old man had died that day.

To go from Yamaguchi to Kashiwazaki you skirt the foot of Atagoyama. You pass through a pine wood bordering the rice fields, and from where the houses of Kashiwazaki come into view it becomes mixed woodland.

On the summit of Atagoyama is a small shrine, with its approach path in the woods. At the foot stands a torii and some twenty or thirty old cedars. Beside them is another empty hall, and before it a stone pillar carved "Mountain God." It has long been said that the mountain god appears there.

A young man of Wano, having business in Kashiwazaki, passed near this hall in the evening. A tall person was coming down from the top of Atagoyama. Who could it be? He kept his eyes fixed on the person's face through the trees as he drew nearer, and at a bend in the road they came face to face.

The other seemed not to have expected it either and stared at him in great surprise. Its face was bright red, its eyes blazing, looking thoroughly startled.

It was the mountain god. Realizing this, the young man ran all the way to Kashiwazaki without looking back.

* Many mountain-god stones stand in Tono. Each was set up to placate the god at a place where someone met the mountain god or was cursed by it.

In Matsuzaki village there is a mountain called Tengu-mori. A young man of the village was working in a mulberry field at its foot when he suddenly became unbearably sleepy. He sat down on the ridge between the fields to doze, and a very large man with a bright red face appeared.

The young man was good-natured and had always loved sumo. It galled him to have a strange giant stand before him looking down from above, and he leaped to his feet.

"Where have you come from?"

There was no answer. He meant to give him a shove and, trusting in his strength, sprang at him. But the moment he thought he had laid hands on him, he himself was thrown and lost consciousness.

When he came to in the evening, the giant was of course gone. When he got home, he told people what had happened.

That autumn a large party of villagers took their horses up to the middle slopes of Hayachine to cut bush clover. When it was time to go home, only this young man was missing.

They all searched and found him dead deep in a ravine, they say, with one arm and one leg torn off.

That was twenty or thirty years ago, and old men who knew the events well are still alive. That there are many tengu at Tengu-mori has long been well known.

In the town of Tono there was a man who knew the mountains well. He had once been falconer to the house of Baron Nanbu, and the townspeople nicknamed him Torigozen, "Lord Bird." He knew everything about the shapes and places of the trees and stones of Hayachine and Rokkoushi.

When he was old, he went mushroom-gathering with a companion. The companion was a master swimmer, said to be able to dive with straw and a mallet, weave a pair of sandals underwater and then come up.

They crossed the Sarugaishi River from the town of Tono, went over Mukeeyama, and entered the mountains a little above a strange rock called Tsuzukiishi in Ayaori village, where the two separated.

Torigozen climbed a little way alone. The autumn sun had sunk to four or five ken above the western ridgeline.

Suddenly he saw, in the shadow of a big rock, a red-faced man and a woman standing and talking. When they noticed Torigozen, they spread their hands as if pushing him back, warning him not to come. He went on regardless, and the woman clung to the man's chest.

By any reckoning they were not ordinary people. But Torigozen was a joker, and to tease them he drew the mountain knife at his waist and pretended to slash at them. At that the red-faced man raised his foot and kicked, and the moment he felt it, he knew nothing more.

His companion searched everywhere, found Torigozen unconscious at the bottom of a ravine, tended him and brought him home.

Torigozen told the whole story of that day and said:

"Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. I may die of it. Don't tell anyone else."

He lay ill for three days or so and then died.

His family thought the death so strange that they consulted a yamabushi named Kenkoin. The answer was this:

"He disturbed the mountain gods at their play, and died of their curse."

This man was also acquainted with Mr. Ino (Kanori). It was more than ten years ago.

Last year, fourteen or fifteen children of Tsuchibuchi village went to play on Hayachine, and before they knew it evening was near. They hurried down the mountain, and when they were close to the foot they met a tall man climbing quickly up from below.

He was dark-skinned, his eyes glittered, and on his back he carried a small bundle wrapped in an old pale-blue cloth that looked like hemp.

They were frightened, but one of the children called out:

"Where are you going?"

"Going to Okuni."

But this path did not lead over to Okuni. The children stopped, puzzled, and no sooner had he passed them than the man was already out of sight.

"A mountain man!"

They all cried out and ran home, it is said.

The wife of Kikuchi Kikuzo of Wano came from Hashino, beyond Fuefuki Pass.

While his wife was visiting her family, their son Itozo, five or six years old, fell ill. Kikuzo left home after noon and crossed Fuefuki Pass to fetch his wife.

The pass is part of the same range as the famous Mount Rokkoushi, and the mountain road is deep in trees. Especially where it begins to descend from the Tono side toward Kurihashi, the road is an udo, a cutting with steep walls on both sides.

When the sun was hidden by the cliffs and it had grown dim all around, a voice behind him called, "Kikuzo." He turned and saw someone looking down from the top of the cliff. The red face and the glittering eyes were the same as in the previous story.

"Your child is already dead."

Hearing those words, he felt a stab in his chest before he even felt fear. The figure had already vanished.

He hurried back with his wife that same night, and indeed the child was dead. That was four or five years ago.

* An udo is a road cut deep between high banks. The utauzaka of the provinces along the Tokaido are probably cuttings of this kind.

This Kikuzo went on an errand to his elder sister's house in Kashiwazaki. Putting the leftover mochi from his meal inside his kimono, he passed through the woods at the foot of Atagoyama and met Tohichi of Zotsubo, a heavy drinker and a good friend of Kikuzo's.

Though it was in the woods, there was a small patch of grass. Tohichi pointed to the grass with a grin.

"How about a bout of sumo here?"

Kikuzo agreed, and they grappled for a while. But Tohichi was oddly weak and light, and Kikuzo could pick him up and throw him with ease. It was such fun that he wrestled three bouts.

"I'm no match for you today. Well, let's go."

So Tohichi said, and the two parted.

After walking four or five ken, Kikuzo noticed that the mochi in his kimono was gone. He went back to the place where they had wrestled and searched, but could not find it. Only then did he think: was it a fox?

But it would have been embarrassing, so he told no one. Four or five days later he met Tohichi at the sake shop and told him about it, and Tohichi said:

"Why would I wrestle? I was at the coast that day."

So it became all the clearer that he had wrestled with a fox.

Even so, Kikuzo kept it to himself. But during the New Year holidays last year, when everyone was drinking and the talk turned to foxes, he confessed, "Actually, I too...", and told this story, and everyone roared with laughter.

* Zotsubo is a place name and also Tohichi's surname. I have discussed the place name Zotsubo in Ishigami Mondo.

Kikuchi so-and-so of Matsuzaki is forty-three or forty-four this year. He is a master gardener, and he would always go into the mountains, dig up wildflowers and plant them in his own garden, and when he found a rock of interesting shape, he would carry it home on his back however heavy it was.

One day, feeling a little unwell, he went to the mountains to cheer himself up. There he found a beautiful great rock such as he had never seen. It being his usual pastime, he meant to take it home and tried lifting it, but it was very heavy. It was shaped just like a person standing, and about a person's height.

Still he wanted it badly, so he took it on his back and struggled along for about ten ken. But it was so heavy he nearly fainted. Thinking this was strange after all, he stood the rock up at the roadside and leaned against it for a moment.

At that instant he felt himself rising smoothly into the sky, rock and all.

When he seemed to have come above the clouds, it was a very bright and pure place, with all kinds of flowers blooming around, and the voices of many people could be heard from somewhere. Still the rock rose higher and higher, and at last, perhaps when it reached the top, he knew nothing more.

After a while he came to and found himself, as before, leaning against that strange rock.

If he brought such a rock into his house, there was no telling what might happen. Suddenly afraid, he fled home.

The rock is still in the same place. Sometimes when he sees it, he says, he wants it again.

In the town of Tono there was a man of thirty-five or thirty-six called Yoshiko. He had an intellectual disability, and he lived until the year before last.

This man had a habit of picking up bits of wood and rubbish in the road, twisting them and staring at them or sniffing them. When he went into someone's house he would rub the pillars and sniff his hand, and he would lift anything up to his face and sniff it, smiling.

Sometimes, walking along the road, he would suddenly stop, pick up a stone, throw it at a nearby house and shout shrilly, "Fire! Fire!" Then that night or the next day, the house he had thrown the stone at would always catch fire.

This happened many times, and later the households grew wary and took care with their fires, but not a single house, they say, escaped burning.

※ The original refers to this man with a discriminatory term of the time; it has been rephrased.

This happened when Kikuchi Matsunojo of Iide fell gravely ill with a fever and several times nearly stopped breathing.

When he came to himself, he was out in the rice fields, hurrying toward his family temple, Kiseiin. When he put a little strength into his feet, he floated lightly up into the air. He moved along at about the height of a person's head, gradually sinking as he leaned forward. When he put in a little more strength, he rose again as before. It felt indescribably pleasant.

As he neared the temple gate, he saw a great many people gathered there. Wondering why, he went through the gate and found bright red poppies blooming everywhere, stretching as far as the eye could see. He felt more and more at ease.

Among the flowers stood his dead father.

"So you've come too?"

Answering something, he went on and found the son he had lost some time before.

"Daddy, have you come too?"

"So this is where you were."

When he tried to go to him, his son said:

"You mustn't come now."

Just then, someone near the gate was noisily calling his name. It was terribly annoying, but there was nothing for it. With a heavy heart he turned back unwillingly, and at that moment he came to his senses.

His relatives had gathered and were splashing water on him and calling his name to bring him back.

It is common to set up stones by the roadside carved with the names of the mountain god, the rice-field god and the sae no kami, the god of boundaries. Stones carved with the names of Hayachine and Rokkoushi are found in Tono too, but far more along the coast.

The house of Kitagawa Kiyoshi, deputy head of Tsuchibuchi village, is at Hiishi. It has been a family of yamabushi for generations, and his grandfather Shofukuin was a scholar who left many writings and did much for the village.

Kiyoshi's younger brother Fukuji married into a family at Ta-no-hama on the coast. But in the great tsunami some years ago he lost his wife and a child, and with the two surviving children he built a hut on the site of the old house and lived there for about a year.

It was a moonlit night in early summer. Fukuji got up to go to the toilet. It stood some way off, and the path to it ran along the beach where the waves broke.

It was a night of thick mist. Out of the mist a man and a woman came toward him. He looked, and the woman was without any doubt his dead wife.

Without thinking he followed them, all the way to a place with caves on the cape toward Funakoshi village. When he called her name, his wife turned and smiled at him.

He looked at the man, and he too was from the same village, someone who had died in the tsunami. He was the man Fukuji had heard his wife had been deeply in love with before Fukuji married into the family.

"Now I am married to this man."

When his wife said this, Fukuji said:

"Don't you love the children?"

His wife's face changed a little, and she wept.

He did not feel he was talking to a dead person. Sad and wretched, he stood looking down at his feet, and meanwhile the two of them walked swiftly away again and went round the shoulder of the hill on the road to Oura and were gone.

He ran after them, but then it struck him that they were dead. He stood in the middle of the road thinking until dawn, and went home in the morning.

After that, they say, Fukuji was ill for a long time.

※ "The great tsunami some years ago" is the Meiji Sanriku tsunami of 1896.

A fisherman of Funakoshi was on his way home from Kirikiri with a companion one day, and late at night they passed near Shijuhachi-zaka. By a little stream he met a woman. He looked, and it was his own wife.

But his wife could not possibly have come alone to such a place in the middle of the night. It must be a monster, he decided, and without warning he ran her through from behind with his fish knife. The woman gave a pitiful cry and died.

But for some time she did not change back into her true form. He grew uneasy after all, left the rest to his companion and ran home.

His wife was waiting at home, unharmed.

"I just had a frightening dream. You were so late coming home that I went out halfway to meet you in my dream, and on the mountain road something I couldn't make out threatened me, and just as I thought I would be killed, I woke up."

So that was it. He went back to the spot, and the woman he had killed, before his companion's very eyes, had at last turned into a fox, they say.

It seems that when one walks the fields and mountains in a dream, the soul sometimes borrows the body of this animal.

A traveler was passing through Toyamane village. It was late at night and he was tired, and seeing that a light was on in the house of an acquaintance, he stopped in, glad of a rest. The master said:

"You've come at a good time. Someone died tonight, and I was at a loss with no one to watch the house. Please mind it for a while."

With that, the master went out to call people.

It was a nuisance, but there was nothing for it. He sat smoking by the hearth. The dead person was an old woman, laid out in the back room. Suddenly he saw the corpse rise slowly up on the bedding.

He was nearly scared out of his wits, but he calmed himself and quietly looked around. There, through the drain hole of the kitchen sink, something like a fox had poked its face in and was staring intently at the corpse.

So that was it. The traveler crept quietly outside. When he went round to the back door, it was indeed a fox, its head thrust into the sink hole, standing on tiptoe on its hind legs.

The traveler beat the fox to death with a stick that lay there.

The night of the fifteenth of the first month is called Koshogatsu, the Little New Year.

Early in the evening, children go round the houses in groups of four or five carrying bags, calling themselves "gods of fortune." They chant, "The god of fortune has danced in from the lucky direction," and are given mochi.

But once evening is past, on this night alone no one goes out. For it is said that after midnight on Koshogatsu, the mountain god comes out to play.

This is the story of a woman of thirty-five or thirty-six named Omasa who lives at Marukodachi in Yamaguchi.

When she was only twelve or thirteen, for some reason she went out alone as a god of fortune. She went from house to house and it grew late, and as she was coming home along a lonely road, a tall man came toward her and passed her. His face was terribly red and his eyes glittered.

Omasa threw down her bag, ran home and fell seriously ill, they say.

On the night of Koshogatsu, or even other nights, on full-moon nights in winter, it is said that yuki-onna, the snow woman, comes out to play. She brings many children with her, they say.

In winter the village children go sledding on the nearby hills and sometimes get so absorbed that night falls. But on the night of the fifteenth they are always told, "The snow woman will be out, so come home early."

Still, few people say they have actually seen the snow woman.

On the night of Koshogatsu there are many different rites.

In a divination called tsukimi, "moon viewing," six walnuts are split into twelve halves, put into the hearth fire all at once and taken out all at once. They are laid in a row and counted from the right: first month, second month, and so on.

For a month whose full-moon night will be clear, the walnut stays red for a long time; for a month that will be cloudy, the walnut quickly turns black. For a month when the wind will blow, the walnut makes a whooshing sound and its flame trembles. However many times it is done, the result is the same. And strangely, every house in the village that does it gets the same result.

The next day everyone discusses the results. If, for example, the fifteenth night of the eighth month shows wind, they hurry the rice harvest that year.

* Divination of grains and months is practiced everywhere with some differences. It probably comes from onmyodo, the way of yin and yang.

Yonakami is another divination on the night of Koshogatsu.

A round mirror-shaped mochi is made from each of several kinds of rice. On a tray the same kind of rice is spread flat, the mochi is laid face down on it, and a pot is put over it. The next morning they look, and the kind whose mochi has the most grains stuck to it will have a rich harvest that year. In this way they decide whether to plant early, middle or late rice.

At Yamada on the coast a mirage can be seen every year. It is always, they say, a scene of a foreign land. It is like a city never seen before, with carriages and horses going to and fro in the streets and crowds of people bustling astonishingly. Seen year after year, the shapes of the houses and so on never change at all, they say.

On the bank of the Hayase River in Kamigo village there is a house called "the riverside house."

One day a young daughter of this house was picking up stones on the riverbed when a strange man came and gave her some leaves or the like. He was tall, with a face as red as vermilion.

From that day the girl could tell fortunes. That man was the mountain god, they say, and the girl had become the mountain god's child.

There are people here and there who tell fortunes, saying the mountain god has possessed them. There is one in Tsukimoushi village, a sawyer by trade. Magotaro of Kashiwazaki is another.

Magotaro had once been out of his mind, but after he went into the mountains one day and was given his art by the mountain god, he could tell astonishingly well what was in people's hearts.

His way of telling fortunes is quite unlike that of ordinary fortune-tellers. He never looks at any books. While chatting with the person who has come to consult him, he suddenly gets up and walks about the room, and without looking at the person's face at all, he says whatever comes to his mind. He has never been wrong.

For example, he will say something like this:

"Take up the floorboards in your house and dig in the earth. You should find an old mirror or a broken sword. If you don't take it out, before long someone will die, or the house will burn."

They go home and dig, and it is always there. Examples like this are countless.

Around the time of Bon there is the amekaze matsuri, the rain-and-wind festival. A straw figure larger than a person is made and carried out to a fork in the road and set up there. A face is drawn on paper, and sometimes male and female parts are made from melons and attached. The straw figures for driving out insects have no such decoration and are small.

For the rain-and-wind festival, a house in the hamlet is chosen in turn, and the villagers gather there and drink. Then all together, with flutes and drums, they escort the figure merrily to the crossroads. Among the flutes is a hora made of paulownia wood, like a conch-shell horn, which is blown loudly.

The song they sing then goes:

"We celebrate the rain and wind of the two hundred tenth day. Which way do we celebrate? We celebrate to the north."

* According to the Dongguk yeoji seungnam, in Korea too the altar for appeasing calamities is always built north of the town. Both probably come from the cult of Genbu, the god who guards the north.

※ The two hundred tenth day is counted from the first day of spring, around September 1. It was considered an unlucky day when typhoons were likely to strike.

Gonge-sama is a carved wooden image, one kept by each kagura troupe; it looks much like a lion's head but is a little different. It has great powers.

Long ago, the Gonge-sama of the kagura troupe of the Hachiman shrine at Nibari and the Gonge-sama of the kagura troupe of Itsukaichi in Tsuchibuchi village fought on the road. The Nibari Gonge-sama lost and had one ear bitten off, and to this day it has only one ear. Since it goes round dancing in the villages every year, there is no one who does not know it.

Gonge-sama's power is especially in protecting against fire.

Once the Hachiman kagura troupe went to Tsukimoushi village, and night fell before they could find lodging. A poor household gladly took them in, and they set Gonge-sama on top of an upturned five-sho measuring box and all went to sleep.

In the middle of the night there was a sound of something chomping. They woke in surprise and found that fire had caught the eaves. Gonge-sama on the measuring box, they say, was hopping up and down, eating the fire and putting it out.

Children with ailments of the head and such are often taken to Gonge-sama to have the illness bitten away.

Yamaguchi, Iide, Arakawa Tozenji and Hiwatari in Tsukimoushi, Nakazawa in Aozasa, and Tsuchibuchi in Tsuchibuchi village: each of these places has a spot called Dannohana. And near it there is always, facing it, a place called Rendaino.

Long ago it was the custom for old people past sixty to be sent away to this Rendaino. But the old people could not simply wait to die, so in the daytime they went down to the village and worked in the fields to keep themselves fed.

That is why, even now around Yamaguchi and Tsuchibuchi, going out to work in the fields in the morning is called hakadachi, "leaving the graves," and coming back from the fields in the evening is called haka-agari, "going up to the graves," they say.

* Dannohana is probably dan no hanawa, a place where a mound was built on top of a hill. I believe these were mounds for worshipping the gods of boundaries. I have said in Ishigami Mondo that Rendaino is of the same kind.

※ Rendaino is now known by the name Denderano.

Dannohana is said to be where criminals were beheaded long ago, in the days when powerful clans had their fortified houses. The lay of the land is much the same in Yamaguchi, Tsuchibuchi and Iide: on a hill at the village boundary. The place name is found in Sendai too.

The Dannohana of Yamaguchi is on the hill crossing over to Ohora, continuing from the site of the fortified house. Rendaino lies opposite it, on the other side of the Yamaguchi hamlet, surrounded on all four sides by streams. To the east is the low ground between it and Dannohana; to the south is Hoshiya.

At Hoshiya there are many square hollows called Emishi-yashiki, "Emishi dwellings," whose traces are very clear. Many stone tools are found there too.

In Yamaguchi there are two places where stone tools and earthenware are found; the other is a small district called Horyo. The earthenware here and the earthenware of Rendaino are of entirely different styles. That of Rendaino shows no skill at all, while that of Horyo has skillful patterns and such. Haniwa are found too, as well as stone axes and stone swords.

At Rendaino many coin-shaped objects of clay called Emishi coins (about two sun across) are found. They bear simple spiral patterns and the like. At Horyo round beads and tube beads are also found. The stone tools of Horyo are finely made and of uniform stone, while those of Rendaino are of all sorts of materials.

Horyo is not the site of anything in particular, just a narrow piece of land of about one cho. The bottom of Hoshiya is now rice fields. The Emishi dwellings are said to have lined both sides.

Around here there are two or so places where, it is said, digging will bring a curse.

* In other villages too, the lay of the two places and their relation are said to be similar.

* The place name Hoshiya is found in many places; they were places where the stars were worshipped.

* The Horyo gongen is said to be a snake god worshipped in Tono and throughout the Tohoku region. The origin of the name is unknown.

※ "Haniwa" here seems to refer broadly to old clay objects such as dogu figurines.

In Wano there is a place called Jozuka-mori. It is said to be where an elephant was buried. It is said that only this place has no earthquakes, and nearby people have long said, "In an earthquake, run to Jozuka-mori."

This is certainly a grave where a person was buried. Around the mound is a ditch, and on top is a stone. It is said that digging there will bring a curse.

* Jozuka is written with various characters and is found in great numbers all over the country. This too is a place where the gods of boundaries were worshipped, and I have discussed in detail in Ishigami Mondo its connection with stories such as that of the old woman who strips the dead of their clothes at the River Sanzu. It is also related to the elephant-headed god of Zotsubo, so the elephant legend is not without reason. Calling a mound mori, "wood," is also a custom of the eastern provinces.

The Dannohana of Yamaguchi is now a communal graveyard. Utsugi bushes are planted all round the top of the hill, with an opening like a gateway on the east side. In the middle is a large blue stone.

Long ago someone once dug beneath it and found nothing. Later someone else dug and saw a great jar. The old people of the village scolded them severely, so they buried it again as before. It is probably the grave of the lord of the fortified house, they say.

The nearby fortified house is called Bonshasa-no-tate. Several hills were cut through to bring in water, and moats ran round it three or four deep. Place names such as Tera-yashiki and Toishimori remain, and there is a stone wall from a well. The ancestors of Yamaguchi Magozaemon are said to have lived here; the Tono Kojiki describes it in detail.

In Tono, folktales are called mukashi mukashi, "long, long ago." The most numerous are the stories of the yamahaha. Yamahaha must be the yamauba, the mountain hag. I write down one or two of them here.

Long, long ago, in a certain place, there lived a toto, a father, and a gaga, a mother, and they had one daughter.

When the two of them went to town, they told their daughter:

"Whoever comes, don't open the door."

Then they locked it from outside and left.

The girl was frightened and huddled alone by the hearth. Then, in broad daylight, someone knocked at the door and called:

"Open up. If you don't, I'll kick it in."

There was nothing to do but open the door, and in came the yamahaha. She planted herself at the head of the hearth, warming herself by the fire with her legs spread, and said, "Cook rice and feed me."

The girl did as she was told, set out a meal and fed the yamahaha, and while she was eating, slipped out of the house and ran.

When the yamahaha had finished her meal, she came chasing after the girl. The gap grew narrower and narrower, and just when the hag's hand was about to reach her back, the girl met an old man cutting brushwood in the shadow of the hill.

"The yamahaha is chasing me. Hide me!"

The girl hid in the pile of brushwood he had cut. The yamahaha came after her and, saying, "Where are you hiding?", tried to move the bundles of brushwood, and tumbled down the mountain still clutching them.

The girl ran off while she could and next met an old man cutting thatch grass.

"The yamahaha is chasing me. Hide me!"

She hid in the pile of grass, and again the yamahaha came, tried to move the bundles of grass, and tumbled down the mountain still clutching them.

The girl ran off again and came to the edge of a great marsh. There was nowhere left to go. The girl climbed a big tree on the bank.

"Wherever you go, I won't let you get away."

The yamahaha saw the girl's reflection on the surface of the marsh and jumped straight into it.

Meanwhile the girl ran on again and found a hut thatched with bamboo grass. When she went in, there was a young woman inside. The girl told her what had happened, and the woman hid her in a stone karato, a large chest with a lid.

Just then the yamahaha burst in.

"Where's the girl?"

"I don't know."

"No, she must have come. I smell a human."

"That's because I just roasted a sparrow and ate it."

The yamahaha was satisfied and said:

"Then I'll sleep a while. Shall I sleep in the stone chest or the wooden chest? Stone is cold. I'll sleep in the wooden chest."

And she got into the wooden chest and went to sleep.

The woman locked the chest, let the girl out of the stone chest and said:

"I too was carried off by the yamahaha. Let's kill her together and go back to the village."

The two of them heated a gimlet red hot and drove it into the wooden chest. The yamahaha, knowing nothing, said, "What's that, a mouse?"

Then they brought water to a boil, poured it in through the gimlet holes, and at last did away with the yamahaha. And each of them went home to her parents.

Every mukashi mukashi tale ends with the words "Kore de dondo hare," "And that's the end."

Long, long ago, in a certain place again, there lived a toto and a gaga. They were going to town to buy their daughter's wedding things, and shutting the door they said:

"Whoever comes, don't open it."

"Yes," the daughter answered, and the two of them went out.

Around noon the yamahaha came, ate the daughter, put on her skin and passed herself off as the daughter.

In the evening the parents came home and called from the doorway:

"Oriko-himeko, are you there?"

"Yes, I'm here. You're back early."

The parents showed her the wedding things they had bought and watched their daughter's delighted face.

The next morning, as day broke, the household cock flapped its wings and crowed:

"Look in the corner of the bran shed, kekkero!"

Strange, that's not how it usually crows, the parents thought.

Then, to send off the bride, they set the yamahaha's Oriko-himeko on a horse, and just as they were about to lead it out, the cock crowed again:

"You didn't put Oriko-himeko on, you put the yamahaha on, kekkero!"

It sang this over and over, until the parents at last understood, dragged the yamahaha down from the horse and killed her.

Then they went to look in the corner of the bran shed, and there lay the girl's bones, scattered all about.

* The bran shed means the storeroom.

The story of Benizara and Kakezara, "Red Dish and Chipped Dish," is also told in Tono. Only, Kakezara is called Nukabo. Nukabo means "empty."

It is the story of a girl ill-treated by her stepmother who, by the grace of the gods, at last becomes the wife of a rich man. It has many beautiful scenes. If I have the chance, I would like to write it down in detail.

※ Benizara and Kakezara is a folktale that might be called the Japanese Cinderella.

The shishi odori, the deer dance of Tono, has songs handed down from long ago. They differ a little from village to village and from person to person, but what I heard is as follows. It was copied out a little over a hundred years ago.

* The shishi odori is not so very old in this region. It is well known that it was brought in from elsewhere in the Middle Ages.

※ What follows are songs of blessing in praise of houses, bridges and towns. There are many dialect words, archaic expressions and copying errors, and in places Yanagita himself noted "meaning unclear." Here they are rendered into plain language as far as the sense can be made out. (?) marks a guess. The original can be read by opening "Original text" below.

[In praise of the bridge]

Come and see this bridge.
Who was it that first crossed it?
A bridge you can cross and cross and never reach the end of (?).

See this riding ground,
its cedar avenue running seven ri to the great gate.

[In praise of the gate]

Come and see this gate,
built of hinoki and sawara, an auspicious gate of silver.

Push open the doors of the gate and see:
what a splendid way of living.

[In praise of the main hall]

Come and see this main hall.
What carpenter could have built it?

Great credit to the one who built it:
a temple built long ago by the craftsmen of Hida.

[Kojima song]

At Kojima they built a gate of hinoki and sawara;
this is the auspicious gate of silver.

Push open the doors of the silver gate and see:
what a splendid way of living.

Eight-gabled, roofed with cypress bark (?),
larches grow on the roof.

To the right and left of the larches springs well up,
never running dry, however much is drawn and drunk.

A great temple lit by the morning sun, shining in the evening sun,
with a hundred temple children, cherry-pink.

The water for the ink stone of a thousand ages falls from heaven,
and they stand there waiting for it (?).

[In praise of the stable]

Come and see this kitchen:
woman pots and man pots, sixteen pots in all.

When rice is cooked in the sixteen pots,
forty-eight horses go to cut the morning grass.

With those horses, bellflowers and fine grasses are cut into the morning grass,
and the stable shines with flowers.

In the shining stable the bay horse
stamps its feet: "May the house prosper!"

[Song of greeting]

I hear there are masters of song in this yard.
Even as we dance, we feel shy.

We learned yesterday and dance today.
Forgive us our clumsiness.

Our greetings would have no end.
Let us bow and rise, my friends.

[In praise of the masugata]

Come and see this measure:
a yard four-square, square as a measuring box.

Come and see this inn.
They call it the inn of human kindness.

[In praise of the town]

Come and see this town:
fifteen ri long and seven ri wide.
Don't get lost, my friends.

[In praise of the kendan]

Come and see the kendan, the town official,
with a banner raised in the middle of the town.

In front are Tatemachi and Aburamachi.

Lord kendan naps in his upstairs room,
his head on a pillow of coins, playing with toys of gold.

Come and see this notice board,
the board that lists what must not be done (?).

The high place is called the castle,
the low place, the castle town.

[In praise of the bridge]

Come and see this bridge:
a crossroads of gold, a bridge of silver.

[In praise of the lord]

Come and see this hall,
four-square on every side, held together with a single wedge.

Take up a fan, take up a rosary,
and worship, and blessings will come.

[In praise of the house]

Rafters of gold,
and waves rising on the ridge where water flows (?).

[Namiai]

I hear there are masters of song in this yard.
Even as we sing, we feel shy.

Mats edged with ungen brocade and Korean borders,
mountains of flowered mats: spread them lightly in this yard.

On a stand of gold lacquer, choose jeweled cups and set them out,
and place them in this yard.

When a girl of seventeen pours the sake (?),
the whole yard lights up.

If you will accept a cup of this sake,
your life will be long and you will prosper more and more.

For relishes there are sea bream and sea bass,
and the famous light plums of China (?).

Our greetings would have no end.
Let us bow and rise, my friends.

[Hashira-gakari]

Bring in the go-between, bring in the go-between.
Without a go-between, the yard is lonely (?).

A fawn, once born, roams round the mountain.
We too roam, round and round the yard.
* The masks of the shishi odori have deer-like faces.

When a pillar is raised in this yard,
the deer polish their antlers and grow young again.

When you raise the pines of Matsushima,
the troublesome ivy twines round the pines.

Even the ivy leaves twined round the pines of Matsushima,
if there is no bond, will slip loose.

A Chinese-painted screen that costs nine kan in Kyoto,
set up lightly around, three and four folds deep.
* This song is the most interesting.

[Mezu suguri: choosing the doe]

Bring in the go-between, bring in the go-between.
Without a go-between, the yard is lonely (?).

A fawn, once born, roams round the mountain.
We too roam, round and round the yard.

When I set out to seek the doe,
mist hangs over the mountain of Hakusan.

How happy: the wind has blown the mist away.
Now let us go and seek the doe.

However the doe may hide,
we will part the pampas grass and seek her.

The doe in the shade of the bamboo leaves,
however she hides, will be drawn out.

See the ways of the doe and the great stag.
The heart of the deer is a gracious thing.

The great stag of the deep mountains
has come out to dance for the first time this year.

Robbed of his doe and burning with longing,
what a smoldering-hearted stag (?).

When you raise the pines of Matsushima,
the troublesome ivy twines round the pines.

Even the ivy leaves twined round the pines of Matsushima,
if there is no bond, will slip loose all at once.

The shore birds on the sandbar offshore
sway gently, then softly take flight.

[Nagekusa]

Who was it that gave us this nagekusa?
We are grateful for the kindness of the giver.

What carpenter made this stand?
At its four corners, treasures at play (?).

What sake do you take this sake to be?
It is the famous chrysanthemum sake.

What coins do you take these coins to be?
Are they what was left from a pilgrimage to Ise or Kumano?

What paper do you take this paper to be?
Danshi paper of Harima, or paper of Kashima?
Play along its folds (?).

Where does the fan make its home?
The fan's palace is the shrine of Sannai (?).
The one who lives within is the rivet, the kaname,
and the folds lie layered upon it.