Disturbances in a house: objects moving, stones falling, sounds with no source. The oldest Japanese entry is four lines in a national chronicle under a month of 776, recording that stones and clods fell of themselves in the palace offices and about the capital. An Edo collection gives the pattern its shape — it begins, it runs for twenty-odd days, it ends — and one long case in which a household negotiates with the thing, feeds it, tests whether it can write, and finally moves house without escaping it. Four reports from the nineteenth century add what the older books never had: dates, places, and a suspect.