Greetings yokai lovers!

Tonight’s story is from Shimōsa Province, which today covers part of Chiba, Ibaraki, Saitama and Tokyo Prefectures, however, the precise location of Sano nor of the Yuzuru Kannon are not known. It’s a strange story in which the main character gets teleported across the country from Shimōsa to Sado in the pursuit of military knowledge.

Today’s story features another chigo and also uses the term kamuro to describe the person carrying the teacup. Both chigo and kamuro are common figures in Shokoku hyakumonogatari. Kamuro have appeared in other posts in this series, so I’ll refer to them to explain the term.

The tiny man in the cup is hard to figure, as nothing detailed is given about him, other than he is tiny and is carried around in a teacup by a kamuro, and has the ability to grant wishes. Presumably this tiny man is one of the many forms of Kannon, a Buddhist goddess of mercy. The tiny man reminds me of Issun bōshi, a Japanese fairy tale character, but it’s hard to say much else about him.

Anyway, here is the story!

Learning the Art of War from Yuzuru no Kannon

In a place called Sano in Shimōsa Province there was a samurai who excelled in the art of war. In the same province was another man who, one way or another, wished to surpass this master tactician. He had heard that there was a renowned and miraculous holy site called Yuzuru no Kannon deep in a place called Tatebayashi, so he went there and prayed continuously for his wish to come true.

On the third night of his vigil, a kamuro of around eleven or twelve appeared, carrying an indigo-dyed teacup in which sat a person. The person in the teacup said, “If you can defeat this chigo in sumo, I will grant your wish.”

The man wrestled the chigo, but the chigo was stronger than he expected. It looked like he was going to lose. Finally, he managed to grab the chigo, but just as he was about to throw him down, he was thrown down himself.

When he got up, he saw that he was not standing in front of the Kannon statue, but was instead on top of a steep, rocky crag. Surprised and confused, he managed to descend to the base of the crag by clinging to the branches of trees growing out of the cracks in the rocks. Then he found someone on the road and asked, “Which way is Sano?”

The traveler laughed and asked him, “Who are you, and what are you talking about?”

Thinking this strange, the man asked, “What is this place called?”

“This is Sado Province,” replied the traveler. “And where did you come from?”

“I came from the top of this mountain,” replied the man.

The traveler was astonished. “This mountain is called Hokusangatake, and no humans live there anymore. Why have you come down from this mountain? You must not be human!” And he ran away in fear.

Afterwards, the man boarded a ship headed for the eastern provinces and returned to his village in Sano. He was so puzzled that he returned to Yuzuru no Kannon’s village, and the person in the teacup appeared once again.

“Well, well, you are an honest and good-natured person. Therefore, I will grant you your wish,” said the person in the teacup. And he taught the man all of the secret techniques of the art of war.

After that, the man became a renowned tactician. He even mastered the technique of not allowing others to draw their swords, and the technique that, if his arm was ever cut by another’s sword, he would make it so that he was not injured at all.

Until very recently, his child resided in Edo, but I heard that he is no longer able to perform that technique.

Greetings yokai lovers!

Tonight’s story is another one featuring a tanuki, and like the one from last week, it has a bloody ending. This time, though, the yōkai is a lot more dangerous.

The ending of this story matches a pattern that is seen in several yokai stories from all around Japan. Aside from a wild animal disguising itself as an old woman, discovering the pile of bodies underneath the floorboards seems to have been a popular folklore trope. We see it in story patterns like senbiki ōkami, although that is with wolves and not tanuki.

Anyway, this story serves as a reminder that even the furry little critter yōkai are sometimes vicious man-eaters!

Here is the original illustration for this story. (That’s a big tanuki!!!)

—-

The Tanuki Who Transformed into an Old Woman at Nabari, Iga Province

In Iga Province, there is a mountain village to the southeast of a place called Nabari. In this village, every night, one by one people were disappearing. Nobody knew who or what was responsible. One person had their child taken, another person had their parents taken, and the crying and grieving was too painful to watch.

One day, a hunter from that village went into the mountains at dusk. A person came at them from out of the mountains, and when he looked to see who it was, it was a hundred-year-old woman, with disheveled white hair scattered in all directions, and shining eyes. Her appearance was inhuman, so the hunter immediately nocked a crescent-headed arrow and recklessly fired it with a loud twang. It looked like he hit, but the woman got away.

In the morning, the hunter went back to that spot and found a trail of clotted blood that went here and there among the mountains. He followed the trail of blood back to his village, to a small hut behind the village headman’s manor. The hunter was mystified. He asked the village headman, “Who lives in the small hut behind your house?”

“My mother lives there,” he replied. “She is retired. She hasn’t been feeling well since last night, and she won’t eat or let anyone near her.”

The hunter replied, “Well, I have a strange story about that…” And he told the headman everything that had happened.

The headman was also mystified. He went to the small hut, but his mother realized out what was going on, and in an instant she tore through the wall of the hut and ran off. They looked into the bedroom and found a pool of blood the size of a rug. When they looked under the floor, they found countless human bones, including the hands and feet of a child, which had been chewed up and discarded there.

After that they searched the mountains and found the corpse of an old tanuki whose chest had been pierced by an arrow. The headman’s mother had earlier been eaten by this tanuki, which then disguised itself as her and took her place.

Greetings yokai lovers!

Tonight’s story is another one dealing with attachment. And once again, snakes are used as a symbol for that attachment.

One term that might be unfamiliar to some readers is chigo. This term pops up a fair amount of yōkai stories, and while it literally just means a child, it refers to young boys who were apprenticed to temples but too young to shave their heads and officially become monks. Chigo served as pages and attendants to elder priests, who often dressed them up and had pederastic relationships with them. This adds a layer of complexity to the situation between the boy and the girl in the story. Was the reason he was disinterested in her that he simply did not like her that way? Was it because he was still too young to see this girl as a romantic partner? Were her affections towards him so strong that they made him uncomfortable? Or was he maybe being pressured by an elder lover at the temple to break things off with her? The ambiguity in the story means each reader will probably see it slightly differently.

Here is the original illustration that goes with this story. You can see that the “snake” is once again depicted as a dragon.

—-

Watanabe Shingorō’s Daughter and Her Affection for a Chigo in Wakamiya

There was a man named Watanabe Shingorō in Kamakura. He had a fourteen year old daughter. One day she went on a pilgrimage to Wakamiya, and when she first laid eyes upon the priest’s chigo, she fell so deeply in love that she became gravely ill from lovesickness.

The girl confided her feelings to her mother, and so her father, who had been worried about her illness, sought out a good intermediary and contacted the chigo’s parents. The chigo’s parents gave their permission for the girl to begin seeing the boy.

However, as the chigo was still very young, he did not have very deep feelings towards the girl, and the idea of marrying her disinterested him. The girl’s spirit grew ever weaker, and finally she died. Her grieving parents had her cremated, and placed her bones in a box in a certain room with the intention of interring them in Zenkōji in Shinano.

Later, the chigo also became ill, and although various remedies were tried, they had no effect. Afterwards, he did not like to be near other people. His mother and father were perplexed, and so they spied on him through a crack in the door to discover him sitting across from a giant serpent and speaking with it. His parents were so grieved and saddened by this that they asked priests and yamabushi to pray for his protection, but these had no effect either, and finally he died.

When they buried the chigo in the mountains west of Wakamiya, a giant serpent was found in the coffin entwined around the chigo’s corpse, and they had to bury it together with the chigo. Later, when the daughter’s remains were taken to Zenkōji to be interred, the mother discovered that all of the bones had either turned into or were currently transforming into tiny snakes.

How terrifying a thing it is that the daughter’s attachment possessed and finally killed the chigo.