The twenty-seventh book of the Konjaku monogatarishū is the one headed for spirits and demons of Japan. It runs to forty-five tales, and it contains some of the most famous supernatural material in the language — the demon of the Rashōmon’s neighbourhood, the bridge at Agi, the woman eaten in the palace grounds, the wife who returns in her own shape, the fox on the Kaya river.
The tale the compiler put first is none of those. It is four sentences about a street corner.
North of Sanjō, east of Higashi-no-Tōin, the corner there is a place called Onidono — the demon hall. And in that place, the tale says, there was a spirit.
That is the opening, and it is the opening of a gazetteer entry rather than a story. The grammar is locative: not there was a man who, but at this junction, there is this.
The note on this site about what the night parade of a hundred demons was before it was a picture deals with the habit this belongs to — a court official in 1035 writing a haunted address into his diary as an ordinary proper noun. Here is the corresponding tale, and it turns out to explain the name.
The next sentence is the reason to write this article.
The spirit dates, it says, from a time when the capital had not yet been moved here.
On the ground where the demon hall later stood, in those days, there was a great pine tree.
Kyoto was established at the end of the eighth century, and this collection was put together around the twelfth. So the tale is claiming that the haunting of this junction is older than the junction — that before there were streets to number, before there was a city to have a Third Avenue in, the ground was already occupied.
A man was riding past the place, with a quiver on his back.
Suddenly there was thunder and lightning and the rain came down hard. He could not go on. So he got down from his horse, took the bridle himself, and stood under the pine tree.
The lightning struck, and split and killed both the man and the horse.
And then, in one clause: that man thereupon became a spirit.
No interval. No wrong done to him, no enemy, no unfinished business, no dying words. He is not named. His rank is not given. He was going somewhere and it rained.
Afterwards, the tale says, the capital was moved. The spot became somebody’s house, and people lived in it.
But the spirit did not leave the place. And it is a spirit there to this day, as people have handed down.
The word order matters. It is not that a house became haunted. It is that a haunted piece of ground had a house built on it, and the arrangement did not suit the previous occupant, who had been there since before the surveyors came.
Then the compiler adds an aside of his own, and it is the best line in the tale: “An exceedingly old spirit, this one.”
He is not frightened. He is impressed by its length of service.
The phrasing is worth pausing on. A spirit is being measured not by what it did or how dangerous it is, but by how long it has been in post. That is the vocabulary of tenure, not of horror.
And the closing sentence: at that place, inauspicious things happened again and again.
Look at the contents list of that book and the placement stops looking accidental.
The first six tales are all about buildings and sites. This corner; then the Kawara mansion, where the ghost of its dead owner appears to a retired emperor; then a hand beckoning out of a hole in a pillar at Momozono; then two tales set at the Reizei palace; then a bronze spirit dug up at Higashi-Sanjō.
Six site-haunting tales in a row, before a single free-moving demon appears. After them come the oni who eat people, then the returning dead, and at the far end a run of five fox tales. The tale the ubume note on this site is built from sits at number forty-three, near the end of that run.
Whoever ordered this book began with real estate. I take that to be deliberate, and it is the kind of editorial decision that survives better than any individual story: before you are told what walks about at night, you are told which addresses are bad.
Read it beside almost any other ghost story in Japanese and what is missing is conspicuous.
There is no injustice. The man was not murdered, not betrayed, not executed on a false charge. Our notes on Sugawara no Michizane and on the head of Taira no Masakado deal with the standard machinery — the wronged dead, the harm, the enshrinement, the appeasement. None of it applies here, because there is nothing to appease and nobody to apologise to.
There is also no lesson. He did nothing foolish. Getting off your horse and standing under a tree in a downpour is what a sensible traveller does; the fact that it is precisely the wrong thing to do in a thunderstorm was not available to him, and the tale does not reproach him for it.
And there is no encounter. Nobody in the tale meets the spirit. There is no description of it, no dialogue, no appearance. It simply is at that corner, and things go wrong there.
Strip out what is absent and what remains is not a ghost story at all.
It is a title deed with a warning attached. The function of the tale is to account for a name that people were using — the demon hall — and for a known local fact, which is that bad things kept happening on that corner. The dead man is not the subject. He is the mechanism.
Once you see that, the placement makes sense. The compiler opened his book of spirits and demons not with a famous vengeful ghost but with a nameless traveller and a junction, because the first thing that book has to establish is the principle the rest of it runs on: that a location can hold a thing, and hold it across the founding of a city.
Our note on the well at Himeji deals with a place that swallowed a story, and the killing stone in our note on Tamamo-no-Mae is another. This is the oldest and plainest case of it in the collection, and the story it swallowed was hardly a story to begin with — a man, a horse, a tree, and rain.
The readings in “What the Tale Refuses to Supply” and “What It Is Actually For” are KWAIDANOTE’s own.
Found an error? Write to kwaidanote@gmail.com — corrections are made on this page and dated.