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.
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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.