Comedy and horror go together like pizza and beer, and tonight’s story mixes the two together very well (comedy and horror, that is).

The story references a creature called an ugume, which is just a corruption of the yokai known as ubume. This is a complex yokai with a long history. While ubume is usually thought of as a ghostly woman (thanks to Toriyama Sekien’s illustration), it has a complex history and was originally depicted as a bird that screams like a human baby. In the end, however, the monster in this story turned out not to be an ugume, but something more mundane like aosagibi.

Now, there is some kind of bird living in the mountain just outside my studio that calls several times per day. It repeats three or four times in a row and it sounds like a screaming child. The call travels really far, so I can never see just what type of bird this is. I have no idea what it could be, but it’s got such a unique cry that I really want to figure it out. Listening to this bird so often yet never seeing it, it’s not hard for me to imagine the fear that people centuries ago might have felt at hearing unfamiliar, eerie cries coming from the forests.

The Ugume of Tsuru-no-hayashi

Around the first year of Kan’ei (1624), there was a mausoleum called Tsuru-no-hayashi in the eastern part of Kyōto. Every night a monster called an ugume would come here and wail like a crying infant. Nobody dared pass by after dark, and the back gate was locked up tight so that nobody could enter.
One person heard about this and said, “I will go see this for myself.”

So, one rainy night when there was a sense of dread in the air, he went to Tsuru-no-hayashi and waited for the ugume. Sure enough, at the fifth hour (around 8pm), a blue flame about the size of a parasol floated up from the direction of the Shirakawa River. As it drew near, just as people described, there was the sound of a crying infant. The man drew his sword and leaped at it, cutting it in two. The pieces fell with a thud, and he stabbed them again, shouting in a loud voice, “I killed the monster! Come here! Come here!”

The people nearby lit torches and gathered to see. It turned out to be a large night heron. Everyone burst into laughter and went home, saying that it was a silly thing to be frightened of.