Japan's fading phantoms live on in folk tales

Ryokufuso, a classic Japanese inn in Ninohe, Iwate Prefecture, is famed for its resident specter--known in Japanese folklore as zashiki warashi. When the inn burned down last autumn, it was rumored that a small child, clad in red kimono, darted out of the flames and fled into a shrine behind the main building.

The shrine and the sign for the inn survived the fire, as if to watch over efforts to rebuild the hotel and to resume business.

Zashiki warashi, a mythical child-goblin indigenous to the Tohoku region, is said to inhabit historic homes and bring good luck to their owners. "A home inhabited by this god shall never want for wealth," wrote the folklorist Kunio Yanagita (1875-1962) in "Tono Monogatari" (Tono stories) a record of folk legends he published 100 years ago. The work has since earned Yanagita the sobriquet, "the father of Japanese native ethnology."

Yanagita was a 33-year-old official of what was then the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce when he met Kizen Sasaki (1886-1933), a folklore expert and native of Tono, Iwate Prefecture. Sasaki was an aspiring young writer who had left his hometown. He haltingly recounted to Yanagita strange tales of otherworldly beings back home. Utterly fascinated, Yanagita wrote down the stories and began visiting Tono.

Yanagita self-published "Tono Monogatari" in 1910, producing an initial print run of 350 copies. Written in the bungo-tai classic Japanese literary style, the work is replete with tales--spanning the realms of reality and fantasy--of legendary spirits and goblins such as kappa (an imaginary amphibian creature) and tengu (a long-nosed demon) and supernatural phenomena such as kami-kakushi (spiriting-away of humans by gods).

Novelist Yukio Mishima (1925-1970), who claimed to have read the book as "a work of literature," was unstinting in his praise: "With ultimate simplicity, the truth is laid bare like a drawn sword that has been put down casually."

Far from cultural centers such as Kyoto and Edo (present-day Tokyo), there once thrived many rich local cultures. Every region has its own legends and oral traditions, but they will die out unless someone writes them down for posterity. In that sense, what Yanagita saved from extinction is invaluable. His method, which relied more on field work than written materials, is still being used by native ethnologists today.

In the century since the publication of "Tono Monogatari," Japan has become largely homogenized, which bodes ill for some local dialects. Fortunately, however, many old folk tales have been written down and are now safely preserved in book form.

Yanagita's footsteps and ghostly zashiki warashi apparitions are now lodged deep in the mountains of snow-bound Tono.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Jan. 9