THERE IS NO COLUMN FOR IT

A domain forester keeps two books: one for the timber, one for what comes down the mountain at night. The second book exists because the first has no column for it.

Two women take turns calling a name down a well with nobody in it, and neither of them explains.

Five stories, each grown out of a short item in a Japanese record printed in 1903, 1913 or 1919. Three of them were filed under grudge-spirits.

What a record gives is an event and almost nothing of a life. What these give you is the house it happened in: a day-book that marks which measurements were taken with a cord and which with a man’s own hand; a letter a man writes for Ume, who is five, his dead sister’s child, to be kept until she can read it herself, because what lies between her mother’s death in the north and her mother’s funeral in the west has to be set down by somebody.

After each story there is a short piece on what the story walks past without stopping for — what a mountain ascetic was paid in, what a village did about the god in its well.

The records are real. The stories made from them are new fiction — not translations, and not accounts of real events.

Kwaidanote Casefiles, Book Two. The five subjects behind it have notes of their own on this site — what each one is, and what kind of book recorded it: the centipede, the spirit of the first wife, the god of the well, the human-face sore, and the grudge of a mountain ascetic. They set out the subjects, not the stories.