The dog-god: not a creature that appears to anyone, but something a household was said to keep and to pass on with its property. The belief is recorded across Shikoku and western Japan under this name and several others, and the written instructions for making one survive only as one book quoting another, with no point in the chain where a writer says he saw anything. What the records document is what the naming was used for: households others would not marry into, and land nobody would buy. Nothing on these pages is evidence that anyone was possessed, and no family is being described.