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