Mochisuke hesitated. He remembered the diviner’s warnings. But he also considered that refusing to acknowledge a colleague entirely might seem rude—and technically, speaking through a closed door wasn’t quite the same as opening it.
He showed his face. He spoke.
That night, he fell ill. Within four days, he was dead.
The rival attended the funeral and spoke words of mourning.
But classical Japanese narratives rarely let such deeds go unpunished. Within months, the rival descended into madness, plagued by visions of his victim. He died violently, by his own hand. The curse-worker was later found dead as well, his body covered in self-inflicted wounds, his face frozen in an expression of terror.
Points of Interest You Might Have Missed
The Mathematics Connection
Here’s something fascinating that doesn’t immediately surface in most retellings: the victim wasn’t just any bureaucrat. He worked in the Bureau of Accounting—and in Heian Japan, mathematics occupied a strange position in society.
Unlike in China, where mathematics developed as a respected scholarly discipline, Japanese society viewed calculation with considerable suspicion. The ability to manipulate numbers quickly was seen as almost supernatural. Arithmetic specialists frequently held concurrent positions as court astronomers or onmyōji—practitioners of yin-yang arts.
The famous Abe no Seimei himself served in the Bureau of Accounting late in his career. So did Kamo no Yasunori, Seimei’s senior colleague in onmyōdō. In other words, there’s a strong possibility that Mochisuke wasn’t just a talented clerk—he may have been a promising practitioner of the esoteric arts himself.
Read in this light, the story transforms: it becomes a tale of an unlicensed curse-worker eliminating potential competition before it could fully develop. Professional assassination disguised as a cautionary tale about ritual observance.
The Economy of Medieval Motivation
Medieval Japanese narratives have a distinctive quality that modern readers sometimes find jarring: characters don’t agonize over their decisions. The rival in this story doesn’t spend sleepless nights wrestling with his conscience or questioning whether murder is justified. He sees an obstacle. He removes it. The psychology is almost transactional.
This isn’t poor characterization—it’s a fundamentally different conception of how motivation works in storytelling. The Konjaku Monogatari-shū trusts readers to understand that jealousy is sufficient cause for extreme action. No further explanation is needed or offered.
Why the Curse-Worker Agreed
The original text is notably silent on why the unlicensed practitioner agreed to perform the curse. He warns his client that curses rebound on their casters, then proceeds anyway. Was it simply payment? Professional pride? His own reasons for wanting to test his abilities against someone who might have become a formidable onmyōji?
The silence is deliberate. Classical Japanese aesthetics often prefer suggestive gaps to exhaustive explanation.
A Final Thought
There’s something uncomfortably relevant about this millennium-old tale.
The victim didn’t make a dramatic error. He didn’t foolishly ignore clear warnings or arrogantly assume himself invulnerable. He made a small, reasonable-seeming compromise. He was polite when perhaps he should have been rude. He showed his face when he should have remained invisible.
How often do we make similar calculations? How many times do we think, “Well, technically this isn’t quite breaking the rule”? How often does courtesy override caution?
The Heian aristocracy believed that invisible forces moved through the world, seeking entry points into human lives. They may have been wrong about the specific mechanics—but the underlying insight remains sharp: the boundaries we set mean nothing if we’re willing to breach them ourselves, even slightly, even just this once.
The curse finds the crack. It always finds the crack.
That’s what makes this story still worth telling, a thousand years later.