COLLECTION
Stories connected by a shared idea.
Horned, wrapped in tiger skin and armed with an iron club, the oni is the ogre Japan drives out with beans every year. Yet the oldest oni has one eye and no description, the word may once have meant something hidden, and in some villages the oni at the door is a god.
Read story 12 min readA woman in white breathes death on an old woodcutter and spares the young one, on one condition. Japan's most famous snow-woman story was first printed in English, by Lafcadio Hearn in 1904; the snow woman herself is much older, and much stranger.
Read story 10 min readA creature the size of a child, with a hollow of water on its head, waits in the river for horses and swimmers, yet a polite bow can drain its strength. Japan's best-known water spirit has dozens of local names, and an encyclopedia of 1712 draws it as a hairy, upright figure like an ape, not a turtle.
Read story 13 min readA man of Mino married a woman who turned out to be a fox, and asked her to keep coming to sleep with him: that, says a book of about 822, is why the fox is called kitsune. Over the next thousand years the Japanese fox became a trickster, a wife, a messenger of the god Inari and, for some families, a stigma that lasted into modern times.
Read story 11 min readIn 637 a monk told the Japanese court that a roaring star was no meteor but a tengu, a "heavenly dog". Over the next thousand years the tengu became a kite that fooled the pious, the fallen soul of a proud monk, a mountain spirit that carried children away, and at last the red-faced, long-nosed figure still honoured on Kurama and Takao.
Read story 13 min read
