The oldest entry in this file is four lines in a national chronicle, under the ninth month of a year corresponding to 776.
Stones and clods fell of themselves, it says, in the office of the palace pages, and here and there about the capital.
That is the whole record. No agent, no explanation, no outcome. Somebody whose job was to write down what happened in the capital that month considered self-falling stones to be one of the things that had happened, and entered it in the same register as appointments and weather.
Everything else in this note is a variation on those four lines, and the variations run for twelve hundred years.
The next layer is an Edo collection of recorded strange events, whose second book gives the pattern in a single sentence: it was on the roof; they brought a light and looked, and the thing was plainly there; after twenty-odd days it stopped.
A duration. That is the detail that separates this material from ghost stories. Ghosts do not have run-times. This does: it starts, it goes on for a while, it ends.
The same book then gives a case at length, and it is the best account of a haunted house I have read in any language, because nobody in it behaves like a person in a ghost story.
A man in the Nishikubo district of Edo made tatami for a living. He had plenty of custom and lived comfortably; the writer says he knew the man personally.
One night, beside his pillow, something began beating out the rhythm for chopping the seven herbs — and beating it well, nicely in time. He got up and looked. No shape, and the sound did not stop. In the morning he found the bamboo fire-blowing tube split. He bought a new one; that was split too. Every night the same.
So the master of the house addressed it. Beating the seven herbs every night and keeping me awake is no great hardship, he said. But splitting the bamboo is bad, and what will the neighbours think? I will say nothing about the rest — only please stop this.
From that night it stopped.
What continued was milder. The lamp and the tobacco tray would take themselves upstairs. The wife and children were frightened at first, but since no shape was ever seen, they got used to it.
The daughter of the house began feeding it. Anything that came into the house from outside — rice cakes, fruit, whatever it was — she would say “for the monster first,” put it in a clean vessel and set it on the shelf; and after a while it would be gone. It seemed pleased with the attention: a box of powder came down from the ceiling, and a rouge-dish she had been using.
Once she set out paper and paper cord. They went up. She wondered what it wanted with such things — and after a while a gift-wrapper came down, properly folded and tied with the cord, folded in the manner that only someone trained in the etiquette of a ceremonial house can do.
So she reasoned that anything which could do that could write. She ground ink, laid out paper and brush, and sent them up.
It could not write.
At the end of the year, when they pounded the rice cakes, she set the mirror-cake out as usual. It started up the ladder — two rungs, three rungs, and fell. Up again, and fell. Again and again, and in the end it could not get up and fell. It looked as though something was carrying it, though nothing could be seen; only the cake appeared to rise.
From this the writer draws his conclusion, and it is a piece of reasoning rather than a revelation: the thing is small and weak; a four-footed animal could not carry an object up a ladder; therefore it is a wild fox.
The affair became known, the family found the gossip unbearable, and they moved house. It was no different at the new address. What happened after that, the writer says, he does not know.
A lecture course of the 1890s quotes all of the above and then adds something the older books cannot: reports sent to him, from around the country, in living memory. Four of them are worth setting down.
The first came from an acquaintance who said he had seen it himself, in the seventh month of 1853, just after the festival of the dead, in a tenement row in the Koishikawa district of the city. Stones the size of persimmons came down out of nowhere. After that there were falling stones every day, until every pot and pan in the place was broken. The tenants gave up and moved to another district — and the stones moved with them, exactly as before. In the end they left the city altogether. Nobody had any idea of the cause.
The second is dated to 1873 or 1874, at a sake-brewing household in the Kaya district of Bitchū province.
It began one night with what they took for rats: earth and sand strewn over the matting, fragments of tile flying about. It worsened until the same sounds came in broad daylight from rooms with nobody in them, and the sand, gravel and tile-shards lay on the floor as before. The master had trained in the martial arts and was not in the least alarmed; he let it alone.
Then the record turns.
The master’s mother, over eighty, in good health and careful in her habits, repeatedly soiled her bedding. She had no memory of it. It might be, the account allows, that age had made her err without knowing. She was deeply ashamed. She fell into a nervous illness, took to her bed for a long time, and died.
Meanwhile, of several dozen stored tubs of miso, one had been emptied almost entirely, and tea-brown animal hair was found stuck to it, which made them think of a fox or a badger.
And then somebody saw the maidservant asleep in her room, and noticed something odd in how she was behaving. They dismissed her. The disturbances stopped at once.
The account closes by noting that at the house in a neighbouring village where the girl went into service next, the same things began.
The third is a report of 1886, from a village in the Naka district of Chikuzen: a household of three, husband, wife and daughter, overtaken by events they could do nothing about.
They would go to bed at night and wake with every one of their faces smeared with soot from the pot. Firewood would be laid under the stove ready for cooking. Rice would be moved from the pot into the tub — and then the tub would go up to the ceiling, and come down onto the floor again with not a single grain left in it. A voice from the back room would call the master by name and tell him to come; he would go, and there would be nothing.
The report ends: it seems there is something suspicious about the daughter in this case too.
Set the modern cases beside each other and the same sentence closes three of them.
The maid was behaving oddly, so they dismissed her. There is something suspicious about the daughter. In the one case where no such person is named, the investigators simply record that the cause was never known.
The record reaches for the youngest and least powerful person in the house, and when it finds one, it stops looking. That is not a Japanese peculiarity; it is the ordinary anatomy of this phenomenon everywhere, and it is visible here with unusual clarity because the reports were printed without being tidied.
And in Bitchū it cost something. Nobody in that account suspects the old woman of anything. She is simply the one who was ashamed, and took to her bed, and died, while the household was busy watching the sand on the matting and the hair on the miso tub. The report files her death as a detail of the case.
Twelve hundred years, and the stones are still falling by themselves; what changed is that by 1874 there was always somebody in the room to be blamed for them.
The readings in “Who the Record Always Points At” are KWAIDANOTE’s own.
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