RATHER THAN LOOK AT ME

HITOBASHIRA

HITOKUI

BAKENEKO

HEBIONNA

ROKUROKUBI

TSUKUMOGAMI

IKIRYŌ

TATARI

ONMYOJI

MIKO

KITSUNE

YUREI

TSUKIMONO

SEIMEI VOL.01

SEIMEI VOL.02

KŪKAI

HIMIKO

Foxes kept getting into the house to reach the dead woman. A year later, in a possession case that reached a prosecutor, one of them explained the arrangement.

A monk on pilgrimage dipped a finger into the boiling ground. It hurt when he took it out and stopped when he put it back, so he kept going.

Meeting it cost you your senses. Mentioning it indoors brought a curse. A woman looked through a crack in her door, and it told her to go and check her child.

A monk went into the ground alive in the 1650s. For fifty-five years the gong was heard from inside the mound. When they broke it open he was still ringing it.

Temples show ceilings marked with the handprints of men who killed themselves on those boards. A pilgrimage guide had already said it was the grain of the wood.

A servant with no family and no husband planned to bear her child in the hills and die there unnoticed. An old woman took her in and was kind for three days.

Lightning killed a man sheltering under a pine, before the capital existed. Three centuries later the corner where it stood was still called the demon hall.

A man dreamed where his missing brother had died. He wrote to the village office named in the dream, and a clerk and the headman investigated and wrote back.

A philosopher who wanted the belief abolished asked where the most inugami families were, travelled there to see them, and printed the answer in a popular book.

Threads came from the fingertips of the devout. A lecturer measured them, found they were airborne dust, and printed instructions for reproducing it at home.

The bottomless ladle is the famous one. Edo books give four more: throw them food, answer nothing, throw fire at the voices, and refuse to be impressed.

A Kobe paper reported a couple arrested for the money-doubling trick. They chose their marks by asking around for who was devout, and it worked dozens of times.

A newspaper reported a ghost in a photograph in Aomori. The photographer explained it at once: the glass plate had not been cleaned before reuse.

Stones falling by themselves in the palace offices, an Edo house that negotiated with the thing, and modern reports in which somebody always gets blamed.

An Edo dialogue book gives the privy three occupants: a fierce god nobody could name, a Buddhist king of fire, and a Chinese mistress killed in a latrine.

Foxfire had a catalogue around it: twelve kinds of fire, six named local ones, a fire only you can see, and a wet-nurse hanged for inventing a fire pillar.

A boy killed a huge salamander in the Genroku era, his whole household died of it, and a shrine was raised. A zoologist went to look and appended photographs.

Before it was a painted procession it was a word a frightened man reached for, a set of forbidden dates, and an address in Kyoto people called the demon hall.

The chronicle has no box and defers to a volume we do not have. One poem kills him, one gazetteer lets him fly away, and the princess is in neither.

The fox, dog and tanuki in the name were pasted on afterwards. The oldest account of kokkuri traces it to a wrecked American ship and calls it table-turning.

A named writer put the giant skeleton in a girls' magazine and said he took it from a British castle ghost. The famous print is older and shows someone else.

Fishermen had a dozen local names for the thing that comes alongside at night, and agreed on one thing only: hand it a ladle with the bottom knocked out.

In the oldest version the warrior takes the child, carries it home, opens his sleeve and finds leaves. The weight everyone describes is not in that text.

The Heike does not call the creature a nue. It says the cry resembled one — and the nue is a real bird, named in a chronicle of 712 for its call.

The word is in a puppet play of 1709, where it lures lovers to their deaths. Japanese writers on it reach for Yama and Osiris because they have nobody nearer.

Edo writers disagreed about the name: the demon-breaking arrow, or a corruption of the word for breaking a target? Both answers are three hundred years old.

In the eighth-century chronicle Sukuna has two faces, refuses the court and is put to death. In Hida, where he lived, two temples name him as their founder.

In the 1910 book that made it famous it occupies two items, is a boy in one and two girls in the other, and has none of the features now standard.

A survey of 1930 sets out their work as three kinds of calling: the dead, the living, the gods. What it cannot date is the mountain they are photographed on.

The 1677 tale published under that name has no stretching neck in it at all. A head leaves its body, travels the roads at night, and laughs at a traveller.

From a Chinese collection of 1378 to a Kyoto priest in 1666 to a storyteller taken down in shorthand in 1884 — and one of them opens by naming the others.

In 1925 bones turned up under the palace and the papers called it a human pillar. A folklorist replied by listing every place with the story, and who told it.

The dead spirit is written down three centuries before the living one, and the earliest use of the characters for living spirit means something else entirely.

The chapter gives her one piece of physical evidence: after the exorcism the smell of the rite stays in her hair. It never tells her whether she did it.

In the modern play that English sources cite, there is no ghost and no counting. The maid breaks the heirloom plates deliberately, to find out if she is loved.

The poison, the ruined face and the nailed door belong to the play of 1825. The record written a century earlier gives her a disease and a different ending.

In the oldest records the word names people, not a monster, and the net in the story is woven by the imperial army. The spider came centuries later.

He gave Yanagita the stories of Tōno and was thanked under a pen name. In his own books he printed his narrators' names — except the one who gave him most.

The instructions for making a dog-god survive only as one book quoting another. What the record documents is not the rite but what was done to households.

Yanagita's preface of 1910 says he added and subtracted nothing, and wrote it just as he felt it. Both claims are in the same sentence.

He quoted his sources, refused weak evidence, and called his own conclusions conjecture. The object of all of it was to put an end to what he was describing.

A hundred ghost stories, a hundred wicks, one drawn out after each tale. The oldest account of the game is an account of it being interrupted before the end.

The collection this site cites most is missing three of its volumes, and its compiler left blank squares in the text where the names were meant to go.

The preface to Kwaidan says the stories came from old Japanese books. It names five books, and tells you where exactly two of the seventeen stories came from.

In English the kappa is a cucumber-loving water imp. In the Japanese record it loses an arm, buys it back with a medicine formula, and keeps to a fixed date.

In English the tanuki is a cheerful pottery figure outside a restaurant. In three regional collections it eats the head priest of a temple and takes his post.

The earliest tengu in Japanese writing is not a bird and not a mountain goblin. It is a noise crossing the sky in 637, and an old gloss reads it as heaven fox.

A scholar in 1686 went looking for the snow woman in older writing and could not find her. Two centuries later Hearn said a farmer had told him her story.

The eight-headed serpent of the oldest Japanese chronicles is killed halfway through. What is found inside it is still named among the imperial regalia.

In 2022 the killing stone at Nasu cracked and the press announced a fox set loose. The oldest telling ends with the stone broken; the nine tails are recent.

Sugawara no Michizane is the deity students pray to before examinations. What the court enshrined first was not his learning but his anger.

A tenth-century rebel's head was exposed in Kyoto. The mound said to hold it stands among Tokyo's banks, kept by a society with a renovation schedule.

Abe no Seimei's fox mother left a poem on a paper door. The kudzu leaf in its last line was in the poem long before it was her name.

Japan's most famous demon-arm story is set at a ruined gate. The oldest surviving text puts it on a bridge, and the demon in it has no name.

The word now translated as monster first named an event, not a creature. How yōkai, mononoke, bakemono, and ayakashi came to mean what they mean.

Yūrei, onryō, goryō: three words the Japanese record uses for a dead person, and the difference between the last two is something the living decided.

Japan's best-known demon has a biography — a temple boy driven from mountain to mountain by the great saints — and nobody agrees which mountain he ended on.

Two gilded horns, metal teeth, and above them a grieving brow. The Noh mask usually called a demon shows a woman in the middle of becoming one.

Everything an ancient text actually says about the queen of Wa — the embassy, the guarded house, the mound — and the questions the record leaves open.

In the old Japanese records a yūrei is not a type of spirit but one dead person, known by a flute or a hand and returning to what the living left undone.

Japanese possession as the records kept it: a spirit that could be fed and sent away, and a name fixed to a household that no rite removed.

Abe no Seimei's great rival, Ashiya Dōman, is barely a name in the early story collections. How storytellers, a woodblock life and the stage built him a career.

A monk born in 774, and the figure Japan came to call Kōbō Daishi: how the records of one life and the legends of the other part ways.

In old records the fox is less a demon than a neighbor: it asks leave, sets a penance, swears oaths, comes when called. What the sources say, and where they stop.

In English they are ogres and mountain witches. The old records give the same appetite to a mother, a prince, a preacher, and the people one ridge over.

Emperor Sutoku, the onryō of Sanuki: a curse recorded in court diaries and temple records.

A merchant house in Kyoto, two living spirits in one boy, and a record specific enough to name the priest and the year.

The woman in this tale is not dead. That is the whole of its difference from the ghost stories it resembles.

The sun has shut herself in a cave. A goddess turns over a tub, climbs on, and dances until the other gods laugh.

A young official answers a knock at his door, and dies of it. From the Uji Shūi Monogatari and the Konjaku Monogatari-shū.

Chōchin obake, the paper-lantern yokai. A merchant replaces the lantern that lit his accounts for years; the tradition holds that objects keep count.

What the word miko means and what a shrine maiden actually does, from the New Year shrine to the far older role standing behind it.

The shape-shifting cat and the two-tailed cat, constantly mistaken for each other. What actually separates them, and where each one came from.

The long-necked woman of Japanese legend: ordinary by daylight, a neck that leaves her collar by night. The name is younger than you would expect.

Lady Rokujo sleeps in her own rooms while something wearing her face makes Genji's lovers ill.

A life buried beneath a bridge so the bridge will stand. What the records support, and what they only remember.

Not a mountain, not a temple, not a battlefield — a well in a yard, and the child of a serpent god.

A retainer walks toward his mother's sickroom to disprove an accusation, and smells blood halfway down the hall.

A maid with a bad chest, a mistress with a lamp, and the physician who wrote the night down and then explained it away.

They kept the calendar, watched the sky, and told emperors which days and which directions were safe.

A provincial diviner appears once, does something remarkable, and walks back into obscurity.