Kwaidanote
TSUKIMONO
Japanese Horror Folktales Collection — No. 13

TSUKIMONO

Tales of Possession and the Things That Cling

Thirty Japanese tales of tsukimono — the thing that gets into a person, or into a household, and does not easily leave.

Something gets into a person, and afterwards the person is not the only one speaking. Japanese has a word for the thing that gets in — tsukimono, the thing that attaches — and it names the attachment rather than the person. Japanese records set that event down for more than a thousand years, and in all that time they never agreed on what it was.

This is a book about what was believed, and about what was done because of the belief. Nothing in it is offered as evidence that anyone was ever possessed, and nothing in it says that any family, then or now, was dangerous. Where these pages record a village that marked a household, or a domain that burned one, they are recording a persecution.

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Tsukimono

34 tales in this volume

  1. The Child at the Gate
  2. Seven Days of Ink
  3. The Gap it Could not Find
  4. The Road Back to Takasaki
  5. The Geta At
  6. The Vegetable Shop
  7. The Road That
  8. Was not the Road
  9. The Murrain at Kurayoshi
  10. The Cold on the Left Side of the Forehead
  11. The Field Kuda
  12. The Woman of Yamada District
  13. The Fish that Went Bad
  14. The House They Called Wakuri
  15. The Man who Burned his Own House
  16. The Houses at Hirose
  17. A Handful of Grass
  18. The Small Pot and the Red Cloth
  19. The Paper the Priest Sealed
  20. The Fox who Asked for Rice Cake
  21. The Old Woman and the Bamboo Saw
  22. Water for the Thing at the Edge of the Verandah
  23. The Silkworms
  24. The Shrine on Tabushi Mountain
  25. The Cool Wind at the Hour of the Sheep
  26. What the Doctors
  27. Took Out
  28. The Bell over the Roof
  29. The Grave by the Road
  30. At Kinosaki
  31. The Fly
  32. The Two at the Kinu River
  33. The Scissors
  34. The Questions Nobody Asked

The first of them is here in full.

Notes on this volume