Kwaidanote
MIKO
Japanese Horror Folktales Collection — No. 10

MIKO

Tales of Dance, Divination, and the Divine

Fourteen Japanese tales of the miko — the woman who lends her mouth to gods and the dead.

When a house needs something said that no one living can say, a woman is sent for. She sits down, sets out a bowl of water, closes her eyes, and lets something else use her voice. Nothing glows here and nothing floats. The horror is a voice coming out of a person that should not be coming out of her, in a room full of people who can all hear that it is.

These are not fourteen versions of one priestess. She may be a goddess, a farm woman who leaves off her field work when you come about a calling, a travelling stranger with a box on her back, or the last medium of a village that once sent out hundreds. And in every one of them, the woman at the centre is the one person the record never lets us hear from directly.

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Miko

14 tales in this volume

  1. The Tub at the Cave Mouth
  2. One Set of Clothes
  3. The Blade in the Prayer Room
  4. A Fire on the Opposite Bank
  5. What the Wrapping Cloth Held
  6. The Bird in the Katsura Tree
  7. The Net that Burned
  8. A Woman not as Other Women Are
  9. The Lantern under the Pine
  10. They Searched her Clothes
  11. As One Pulls the Legs from a Crab
  12. The Arrow in the Shallows
  13. The Miko who Lay Down
  14. Fifty-nine

The first of them is here in full.

Notes on this volume