robert ito

Speak, Memorates

in Tono monogatari, a turn-of-the-century japanese folklore classic, ghosts and monsters are friendly and sympathetic creatures. why are the “real” people described in the stories almost uniformly horrible and cruel?

Discussed: Cruel Monkeys, Mauled Wrestlers, Fish Brides, Seductive Ogres, Dismembered Kappa Babies, Fierce Tengu, The Rice-Growing Peasants of Japan’s Low Lands

n November 4, initially found difficult to understand. 1908, Kunio Yana­ Over the course of the following year, gita, a thirty-three- Sasaki enthralled the older man with year-old govern- story after weird story, all set in and ment bureaucrat around his hometown of Tono, a place andO self-taught anthropologist, met Ki-­ teeming with spooks, demons, and zen Sasaki, an aspiring writer from the tiny village of Tono, mysterious “mountain men.” The area’s forests, Yanagita in northeastern Japan. The two were introduced by a mu- discovered, were home to all manner of fantastical beasts, tual friend who felt they would enjoy each other’s com- from vicious, grudge-holding wolves to red-faced goblins pany, since Yanagita loved hearing ghost stories and tales who kidnapped and impregnated the local townswomen. of the weird, and Sasaki, then twenty-two, enjoyed tell- Small household idols sprang to life and lent a tiny hand ing them. Tall and bespectacled, Sasaki had dropped out of with the rice harvests; monkeys, cruel and lecherous, rou- medical school after two years to study history and litera- tinely pelted the villagers with stones and nuts. ture, and spoke with a thick Tohoku accent which Yanagita The human residents of Tono were equally peculiar,

18 Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Tengu Messengers Colliding in Midair, 1882. Color woodblock print. Courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art and quite unlike the typical rural mouth thinking it was a cake. He the single, creepy detail, and if his folk—tight-knit, loyal to home and charged out of the hut in shock accounts sometimes ended abruptly, kin—that one expects to find in such and disappeared. It is said that the what of it? For many of them, this places. Where generosity was called hunter later found the man dead abruptness—indeed, their very brev- for, they were tightfisted. When at the bottom of the valley. ity—only added to their eeriness. ­bravery was required, they retreated Yanagita had 350 copies of the in fear. In one of Sasaki’s stories, a lo- What sets these stories apart book produced at his own expense, cal wrestler is mauled to death by a from similar ghost stories and fairy and gave nearly all of them to family wolf while his friends stand idly by, tales—besides, of course, the mysti- and friends. ( The writer also pub- unmoved by the man’s piteous cries fying actions of their protagonists— lished two other books that year: for help. In another, an entire fam- ­is that all of the events in them ac- Nochi no karikotoba no ki, a record of ily dies after eating poisonous mush- tually happened, or so said many of hunting terms used in southern Ja- rooms; the next morning, their rel- Sasaki’s contemporaries. These were pan, and Ishigami mondo, a compi- atives come from near and far to not “once upon a time” tales, but lation of letters written about small make off with all of the family’s pos- real events witnessed in the recent roadside gods.) A few of Yanagita’s­ sessions, down to the jars of miso past by people familiar to many in friends wrote reviews of Tono mo- paste in the kitchen. In nearly every the village. Scattered throughout Sa- nogatari, but the book attracted scant story, the villagers’ actions are mo- saki’s stories were the names of real literary or commercial attention at tivated by greed, fear, lethargy, self- Tono-ites, from Old Oto, the town the time, either in Japan or abroad. interest, or meanness. It’s not only drunkard, to Yanosuke, an accom- Today, however, Tono monoga- that the villagers of Tono sometimes plished hunter and flautist. In some tari is considered a classic through- don’t make the right choice; it’s how cases, Sasaki vouched for the verac- out Japan, and has inspired two films astonishing, how befuddling, their ity of the witnesses. “Maru­kichi,” and a popular manga series. Its au- wrong choices can be. In one story, he said of one, “is a very modern thor (Yanagita, that is, not Sasaki) a hunter is toasting rice cakes over a and intelligent person and he is not is heralded­ as the father of Japanese fire and receives a visit from a large the kind of person to tell a lie.” Sa- folklore studies, while the town of man he does not know: saki also gave approximate dates for Tono has done a lively business as many of the events in his stories. a destination for “folklore tourists” The stranger entered the hut and In 1910, after selecting 119 of the world over, who are guided to gazed in wonder at the toasting Sasaki’s most intriguing tales and various sites mentioned in the book rice cakes. Then, unable to re- traveling to Tono to visit some where ghosts appeared and demons sist, he reached out, took some of the places mentioned in them, trod. While other collections of Jap- cakes and ate them. When all the Yanagita published Tono monogatari anese spook stories have come and cakes were eaten, the stranger (The Legends of Tono). “Kizen is not a gone since Yanagita’s time, his is still left. Thinking the man would good storyteller,” Yanagita wrote in the only one to draw all of its tales come back again the next day, the book’s preface, “but he is hon- from a single town and storyteller. the hunter placed some white est and sincere. I have written the The novelist Yukio Mishima, no stones that resembled the rice stories down as I understood them, slouch when it came to the creepy cakes along with the cakes over without adding a word or phrase.” and unsettling, praised the stories the fire. The rocks became quite It was an odd thing for Yanagita to for their coldness, their tonal flat- hot. The stranger came back as have said about his young colleague, ness, their “unforeseen ghastliness, expected and ate the rice cakes not to mention ungracious. Sasaki like when someone starts to talk and as he had done the previous day. certainly knew a lot of stories of all then suddenly stops speaking.” Then he put a hot stone into his different sorts, and had a way with This year marks the hundredth

19 anniversary of the book’s publica- Vicious old monkeys are like hu- some are maybe a mix of the tion. To commemorate the event, mans. They become desirous of two. One of them might even Lexington Books has released a new females and often steal off the be a deceased relative, or a edition of Ronald Morse’s English village women. They coat their loved one. translation, first published in 1975, fur with pine resin and then 4. Some of them may hurt you, with maps, archival photos, and an sprinkle sand on it. This makes if only given the chance. Oth- updated preface. In June 2010, the their fur and skin like armor, and ers are harmless. town of Tono will host an interna- even bullets cannot penetrate it. tional symposium, where scholars 5. Since it’s impossible to tell the and fans will celebrate the area’s tales Most of the stories are memorates, difference between the harm- and legends, and the two men who a term coined by the Swedish folk- less ones and the ones that brought them to the world. lorist C. W. von Sydow in 1934. Ac- may hurt you, it’s prudent to So what is it about Tono mono­ cording to von Sydow, memorates treat all with caution. gatari—a critical and commercial are personal accounts of experiences bust when it was first released—that that either deal with the super­natural After a brief overview of the so intrigues readers now? Were the or illustrate a specific set of beliefs, Tono region—its geographical his- spooks and demons of Tono real? often religious. If someone truly be- tory, its rivers and villages—the book And why is nearly everyone in the lieves in fairies, say, and then sees opens with seven tales about the ar- stories so very, very mean? one and tells his friends about it— ea’s yamabito,­ or mountain peo- that’s a memorate. After some time, ple. Little is known about them, be- ono monogatari is a small if the story gets told often enough to yond a few physical descriptions. book. Not counting its enough people, the memorate can They are tall, with “strange-colored” T preface and index, the itself become a fairy tale, or a legend. eyes, and shun the people from town. English translation is only sixty- Since the first-person experiences The women have long hair, which three pages long, with no chapters, behind memorates are often based they leave unbound; many of them story titles, chronological struc- upon fairy tales or myths themselves, are former villagers who were kid- ture, or commentary. A few of the whole process can become cir- napped and now live, far from home the ­stories are lumped together by cular: fairy tale spawns memorate and loved ones, with their yamabito common theme—“animal attacks,” spawns fairy tale. The glue holding “husbands.” for instance, or “household gods them all together is that initial belief, Theories abound about who the that come to life”—but most flow whether that belief is about a fairy, yamabito were, or how and why they from one to the next in no discern- or a demon, or a god. came to seek refuge in the woods ible order. There are 119 “legends” The beliefs illustrated in many of Tono. Were they, as Yanagita sug- in all, although many are not really of Yanagita’s memorates can be sum- gested, simply Japanese fleeing from legends in the traditional sense, let marized in this way: the hardships of civilized society? alone stories. The longest go on Were they the offspring of unions for about a page; the shortest con- 1. Monsters and specters live between the local­ Japanese and Eu- sist of two or three sentences. Some among us. ropean traders (hence their unusual are simply descriptions of the local 2. We know this, because lots of height and “strange-colored” eyes)? customs: ways to foretell the future folks we know, like Old Oto, Were they Ainu, descendants of Ja- using rice cakes and walnuts, dances have seen them. pan’s indigenous people? and rites of the new year festivals, Whoever they were, their rela- and so on. Others, like this one, de- 3. Some of these creatures are tions with the townsfolk of Tono scribe the local fauna: human, some are animals, were strained, at best. In the book’s

20 first yamabito encounter, Kahei Sa- then dies. In the third encounter, a they may sometimes appear, have as saki, a local hunter, spies a beautiful hunter spies a yamabito in the woods much to fear from the townspeople woman in the woods combing her and is about to shoot her. “Aren’t as the townspeople have to fear from long black hair. Sasaki fires upon and you my uncle?” the woman cries them—perhaps more, thanks to the kills the woman, who is “rather tall,” out. “Don’t shoot!” The woman—it­ “shoot first” policy of the town’s then cuts off a lock of her hair as is the hunter’s niece, ­after all—was many hunters. Many of those who a trophy, “as evidence of his shoot- kidnapped by a yamabito years ago, have been kidnapped don’t want to ing skill.” On his way home, Sasaki and is now his wife. “I have had be found, nor do the villagers ap- dozes off. While he is in a half-asleep many children,” she tells the hunter, pear all that keen on looking for stupor, another man, “also quite tall,” “but he eats them all. I am all alone them. It’s not that they don’t some- takes the lock of hair and runs off. now. I will spend the rest of my life times miss their old world or past “That must have been a man who here with him, but don’t tell anyone lives; some do. In one story, a young lives in the mountains,” Sasaki says about me. You are in danger now, girl is kidnapped by a yamabito,­ only to himself. so please leave at once.” So her un- to return to her village thirty years In the next encounter, a man cle leaves. “It is said,” the story ends, later, old and haggard. “I just wanted spies a yamabito with a baby on “that he ran off without finding out to come back and see everyone,” her back. “Her feet did not seem to where she was living.” she tells them. “Now I am off again. touch the ground,” wrote Yanagita. Why didn’t the woman simply Farewell.” The woman comes, “passes indiffer- stay with him? One possible rea- A similarly strained relation- ently,” then leaves. Struck with fright, son is that the yamabito and their ship exists between the Tono-ites the man develops a lingering illness, abductees, strange and spooky as and the kappa, mischievous water­

Eileen Luhr micro-interview, part iI. THE BELIEVER: What are the musical/cultural an- Pentecostal churches instead. Finally, Thomas Dorsey, tecedents to Christian rock? Can you trace its devel- who played in Ma Rainey’s band, blended religious opment from an earlier point in time, or is it revolu- themes and the blues to create gospel blues. Eventu- tionary and sui generis? ally, musicians like Sam Cooke—the son of a minister and veteran of the gospel group the Soul Stirrers— Eileen Luhr: Protestants, especially revivalists, brought the sound of the black church into the “sec- have a tradition of incorporating contemporary mu- ular” marketplace. sical forms into their worship practices. The most When it comes to the “usable past” for Christian common quotation one sees in articles about Chris- rock, the origin story that I find interesting is white tian music is the saying “Why should the devil have evangelicals’ claims on Elvis, who grew up in an As- all the good music?”—which was also a Larry Nor- semblies of God church. Elvis’s backup group, the man song. The quotation dates to a nineteenth-cen- Jordanaires, was a gospel quartet; he sang a Thomas tury Methodist clergyman named Rowland Hill. Ex- Dorsey song, “Peace in the Valley,” on The Ed Sul- amples abound. livan Show; and when Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny African American churches during the Great Mi- Cash, and Carl Perkins recorded the impromptu gration provide the best antecedent to Christian rock. Million Dollar Quartet sessions, they sang traditional Mainline churches refused to allow migrants to bring gospel songs because they were all familiar with the their music into church, so migrants joined small music from their upbringings. O

21 spirits ­that live in rivers and ponds. are born,” Yanagita wrote, “they bastard children are grown. Most A full-grown kappa is about the size are hacked into pieces, put into of them are little more than of a human child, with a shell like small wine casks, and buried in the ­sightings—somebody sees a kappa a ­tortoise, a beak for a nose, and a ground. They are grotesque.” boy behind three walnut trees, or disclike depression on the top of its As with the yamabito, it’s the spies an unusually tall man (must head which holds the kappa’s­ life- kappa’s habit of seducing the lo- be yamabito!) sleeping in a thicket sustaining, strength-giving juices. A cal women that makes them so irk- of bamboo. Whose child is it, and trickster figure, the kappa is famed some. This sort of interspecies love- why is he behind those three wal- for hijinks that range from the play- making isn’t confined to Tono, of nut trees? How did that tall man ful (peeking up kimonos) to the hor- course, or even Japan—many pop- come to be sleeping in that thicket rific (eating a child’s guts). In most ular European fairy tales feature of bamboo? No explanations are areas of Japan, their faces are green; similar human/animal­ couplings. given. In the best of all possible in Tono, however, they are red. These stories often­ end happily, endings, the yamabito or kappa, The impish creatures appear in though, with the animal—often just or the offspring of these unholy five Tono tales. In one story, a kappa a cursed human—transforming into unions, simply slip away. Many, is captured after trying to pull a boy’s a comely human spouse (“Beauty however, meet gruesome ends at horse into a deep pool. The villag- and the Beast,” “The Frog Prince,” the hands of the villagers. Some are ers consider killing the beast, but let “Hans-my-Hedgehog,” “The Pig shot at, or boiled, or drowned. In it go after it promises not to bother King”). In Japanese folktales, how- the case of kappa babies, they are any of the other horses. In another ever, these relationships almost al- dismembered. story, a kappalike baby is born in ways end badly: a man discovers he The Tono-ites’ cruelty to outsid- Kamigo village. “There was no defi- married a fish, so the fish leaves; a ers can be explained in a number of nite proof that it was a ­kappa’s child, woman marries a spider, and all their ways—xenophobia, a fear of the un- but it had bright red skin and a large tiny spider kids are killed by the known, a mistrust of freaks and gi- mouth,” Yanagita wrote. “It was in- other villagers. One can’t help but ants—but what of their cruelty to deed a disgusting child.” A man— admire the sheer zoological­ variety.­ each other? How does one explain it’s not revealed whether he is the Japanese men, over the years, have a woman who kills her older sister cuckolded husband—abandons the mated with snakes, cats, frogs, fish, because she thought her sister was child at a fork in a road, but then cranes, foxes, and clams. Japanese giving her the least tasty part of the reconsiders, figuring he could make women, for their part, have been potato, and saving the best part for money by showing the creature to wooed by dogs, monkeys, ogres, spi- herself? Or a father who punishes paying customers. Alas, it’s too late. ders, horses, octopi, and snails. his daughter for her unsanctioned When the man returns, In Tono, many of these “tales” tryst by killing the horse she’s fallen the kappa baby has begin months or even years after in love with? Or a son who calmly already fled. That the kidnapping or seduction has announces that he’s going to kill his particular infant was taken place, when the woman who mother, then does, with two vicious one of the lucky was spirited away is old and her whacks of a hand sickle? ones: “When the As one reads on, kappa-­children the list

22 of sins grows, one after the other, un- rub pieces of wood and then smell like Tono. til it seems there isn’t a single decent his hands. “The legends of Tono are Among the most popular of soul in all of Tono. present-day facts,” he wrote. “This creatures from Japanese mythol- Of course, humans the world alone is their raison d’être.” ogy are the tengu. Originally de- over can be a pretty nasty bunch. You Not that Yanagita was an un- picted as birdlike demons, today’s can find stories of folks killing each questioning cryptozoologist, or a tengu, with bright red faces, white other, or stealing from their friends, loon, or immune to rumors that he beards, fearsome expressions, and just about anywhere you look. If actually believed in such things as enormous noses, most resemble an- Tono seems to have more than its kappa, or ghosts. No, these facts he gry, inebriated gnomes. Over the fair share of such tales, it’s proba- spoke of were the stories themselves. years, tengu had been associated bly because Yanagita wasn’t all that The stories were true because they with mischief, war, and hubris, but interested in hearing about all the had a real impact on people’s lives: by Yanagita’s time, their image had swell things that happened in Tono they influenced the behaviors of the softened, and they were often seen every day, like that one time Mr. Na- people who believed them (“Let’s as the protectors—albeit vengeful, kagawa helped an old woman across not climb that mountain, because fearsome ones—of Japan’s moun- the street, or about how Mrs. Miz- of all the demons that live there”), tains and forests. ota was really good with kids. Tono and they allowed outsiders, whether To contemporary Japanese, tengu monogatari brims over with dark sto- folklorists like Yanagita, or simply are considered the stuff of fairy sto- ries because that’s what Yanagita tourists, to understand the inner lives ries, their red masks used to adorn was looking for—and Sasaki, his in- of the Tono-ites. And they had an af- yakitori restaurants and sushi bars. defatigable supplier, knew it. fective impact: through their telling, For Yanagita, however, tengu were This quest was made infinitely whether through oral narratives or the epitome of the samurai war- easier by the fact that, for Yanag- Yanagita’s own book, local and out- rior code. “As for their personality,” ita, all “stories” were fair game: sider alike shared in the same feelings he wrote, “they often possess special ones about ghosts and monsters, of horror and goose-bumpy fear. characteristics the origins of which, certainly, but also tales of arsons It would be these facts, Yanagita to exaggerate a bit, are in common and homicides and family squab- hoped, that would help him achieve with that of Bushido and do not ex- bles, brushes with vicious animals, his true objective: to get at the spir- ist in other countries.” or weird things observed after a itual core of Japanese culture, the It’s no wonder, then, that in so night of drinking. All were equally multitude of elements that made many of Yanagita’s stories, the yam- ­worthy of inclusion, because all up Japan’s unique—and, to Yanag- abito and kappa, the tengu and the were, in their own ways, equally ita, unchanging—national character. ghost ladies, all the assorted things true. “Quite contrary to the nine- This core, he believed, could only that go bump in the Tono night, hundred-year-old tales in Kon- be found through an understand- are seen as sympathetic. Or that the jaku monogatari (Tales of Long Ago),” ing of the common folk, the “ordi- humans, who encroached on the Yanagita wrote in the book’s pref- nary Japanese” who hadn’t yet been lands of its infinitely more inter- ace, “the legends of Tono reveal tainted by Western capitalism or by esting inhabitants and continue to facts that exist before our eyes.” customs and cultures imported from torment and murder them, are seen The stories of kappa and yamabito other East Asian countries. These as monstrous. were every bit as true as the ones people were still in touch with what told about Tono’s human residents, made Japan Japan, at least in Yanagi- fter the publication of like the local hunter who chal- ta’s mind: its ghosts and goblins and Tono monogatari, Yanagita lenged a bear to a wrestling match, monsters, the “concealed world” A continued to write, pen- or the village idiot who liked to that still existed in remote places ning books and articles on rice

23 farming, Japanese ethnology, Eu- but the tourists don’t want to hear old man, eager to tell at least a few ropean fairy tales, shamanism, and those, and complain if the storytell- of them to anyone who will listen. linguistics. He founded a folk- ers stray from the now well-known “Nobody wants to go near him to lore association and, later, an in- script. No one can say how many listen to the tales,” the book reads, stitute of folklore research, which of Tono’s stories have been lost or but what’s left unsaid is this: not even helped solidify­ his unofficial title forgotten, either because Sasaki be- Sasaki, or Yanagita. as the father of Japanese folklore came too discouraged to publish his It is a confession of sorts, an im- studies. Around the late 1920s, sequel, or because some of the sto- plied mea culpa to both Oto and Yanagita turned his attention away ries were never told to a folklor- the reader. For it was not only the from tengu and yamabito to focus ist, or because tourists simply don’t old man’s friends and family who on the rice-growing peasants of want to hear them, or because the shunned him, but Sasaki, one of Japan’s­ lowlands—a “great shift” last guy who remembered the sto- Tono’s most famous chroniclers, that he never explained, and one ries passed away. who was among those unwilling that continues to baffle researchers Yanagita acknowledged that to stomach an old man’s smell for and academics to this day. Perhaps a whole passel of stories were lost the sake of a motherlode of now- he simply got tired of all the whis- when Otozo Nitta, “Old Oto,” as lost tales. pers about the guy who believed in he was called, died in the summer Yanagita may have been blame- tengu. Yanagita died on August 9, of 1909, half a year after­ the fate- less—Oto died months before the 1962, at the age of eighty-eight. ful meeting between the two men famed folklorist made his first visit Kizen Sasaki kept collecting who would collaborate on Tono mo- to the town—but one wonders if spooky stories from the old-timers of nogatari. “Since he is old,” Yanag- he might have pressed Sasaki a bit Tono, and even wrote his own sequel ita wrote, “he knows the old tales of harder to get at least a few stories to Tono monogatari, which he sent the Tono district very well. He al- from the wise old guy who might to Yanagita to have a look at. Once ways says that he wants to tell the not be long for this world. If he again, his former colleague criticized stories to someone so they will not did not, the blame for the lost sto- him, this time for his prose, which he be lost. But nobody wants to go ries belongs to both men, if not considered too flowery for the genre. near him to listen to the tales be- necessarily in equal measure. But “To write as curtly as possible—this cause he smells so bad. He is espe- if he did, and Sasaki failed to fol- is an ironclad rule in the collection cially knowledgeable about the bi- low his advice, then the wrong is, of old stories,” Yanagita wrote. Sa- ographies of the lords of various of course, Sasaki’s alone. The damn- saki never published the sequel. In- smaller fortresses, the rise and fall ing line, then, becomes something stead, he went to work with one of of households, a variety of tradi- more than just a confession, shared Yanagita’s rival­ folklorists, Moto­yama tional songs from the district, leg- or not—it becomes yet one more of Keisen, writing articles for his jour- ends from deep in the mountains, Yanagita’s digs at Sasaki, the young, nal. After suffering from lung disease and tales about people living back tireless source of his most famous for many years, Sasaki died in 1933 at in the mountains.” book. You can’t tell a story, your prose is the age of forty-seven. The account is a vexing one. lousy, and, oh—how come you didn’t go Sasaki is buried on a hill over- Yanagita’s book, with its open- talk to Old Oto? In the end, Yanag- looking his hometown, where his ended story numbering and free- ita may have been the perfect Tono stories are told and retold to the form structure, seems to forever in- protagonist: mean, aloof at times, scores of tourists who flock to Tono vite new entries. The reader is left supremely self-interested. With hu- every year. Some of the professional with a teasing glimpse of all the mans like him roaming the streets of storytellers have their own tales, ­stories that have been lost to time, as Tono, it’s no wonder the yama­bito ones that they heard as kids, perhaps, well as a haunting image of a lonely kept to the woods. O

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