Speak, Memorates

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

The human residents of Tono were equally peculiar, and quite unlike the typical rural folk—tight-knit, loyal to home and kin—that one expects to find in such places. Where generosity was called for, they were tightfisted. When ­bravery was required, they retreated in fear. In one of Sasaki’s stories, a local wrestler is mauled to death by a wolf while his friends stand idly by, unmoved by the man’s piteous cries for help. In another, an entire family dies after eating poisonous mushrooms; the next morning, their relatives come from near and far to make off with all of the family’s possessions, down to the jars of miso paste in the kitchen. In nearly every story, the villagers’ actions are motivated by greed, fear, lethargy, self-interest, or meanness. It’s not only that the villagers of Tono sometimes don’t make the right choice; it’s how astonishing, how befuddling, their wrong choices can be. In one story, a hunter is toasting rice cakes over a fire and receives a visit from a large man he does not know:

The stranger entered the hut and gazed in wonder at the toasting rice cakes. Then, unable to resist, he reached out, took some cakes and ate them. When all the cakes were eaten, the stranger left. Thinking the man would come back again the next day, the hunter placed some white stones that resembled the rice cakes along with the cakes over the fire. ...