Folk Legends of Japan, page 5
At these words the old woman immediately recovered a good heart and worshiped the Buddha. She went home with a clean, pious heart.
One day when she was going to pay homage to the Kannon of her village, the wind blew in and carried the cloth away to the mountainside. This remains now as the Cloth Rock of Saku. When the old woman arrived at the Kannon shrine, she found the cloth was hanging on the head of the Kannon's statue. So she came to believe in Buddha still more sincerely and she lived there as a nun.
This story may mean that Kannon, disguised as a cow. guided the old woman's fate. The Kannon is said to be the Kannon of Shason-ji on Nunobiki-yama [Mt. Pulling-the-Cloth].
THE TEMPLE OF RAIKYU GONGEN
Hito-dama, literally "human spirit" but more commonly rendered as "death fire," is described in the Minzokugaku Jiten as a yellowish flame with a long tail which comes out of the body just before death. In some places people say that a death fire has a face and speaks. This belief appears in the following legend, along with the idea of goryo.
Text from Densetsu no Echigo to Sado, I, pp. 88-go. Collected in Hojo-mura, Karina-gun, Niigata-ken.
IN ANCIENT TIMES castles stood on Mt. Hachikoku and in Hojo-mura. Mori Tamanosuke was the lord of the castle on Mt. Hachikoku and Hojo Tango was the lord of the castle in Hojo-mura. Being at odds with each other, they often had quarrels and sometimes fought battles. But Mori excelled his enemy in wisdom and valor. Moreover, he was a young and handsome warrior.
Lord Hojo had a daughter whose beauty surpassed that of the prettiest flower. The father married his daughter to Mori, and by so doing he outwardly pretended to become friendly with Mori, while secretly planning his destruction. Friendship now took the place of hostility between the two lords. The young couple lived happily for half a year.
It was one summer day that Hojo determined to carry out his plan to ruin Mori. He sent a messenger for Mori. Unsuspecting, Mori readily accepted his father-in-law's invitation and immediately made ready to go. But his wife, feeling uneasy about her husband for some reason, advised him not to go that day. The husband departed nevertheless, saying with a smile that there was nothing to be afraid of.
When he arrived at Hojo's castle, he was at once guided to the bath to wash off his sweat. But the bathroom turned out to be a hell for him. When he was about to be steamed to death in the locked bath room, he realized for the first time his father-in-law's cowardly trick. He was furious but helpless. He regretted that he had not followed his wife's advice.
After her husband's death, the wife killed herself by thrusting a knife into her throat. Mori's castle on Mt. Hachikoku was soon reduced by Hojo. After that, a strange fire often appeared on Mt. Hachikoku. It always floated to Hojo-mura. When people saw it, they shivered with fear and prayed for the disappearance of the fire, but it grew brighter.
The fire was seen especially on summer evenings and it continued to burn all night long. It was said that the fire was the spirit of Mori's wife.
The priest of Fuko-ji Temple tried to subdue the fire. He built a temple called Gongen-do for the souls of Mori and his wife, and recited sutras for twenty-one days. Thereafter the fire never appeared again on Mt. Hachikoku.
THE ORIGIN OF ENOO-JI
In Hearn's similar legend of "Oshidori" in Kwaidan (XI, 176-78), the mate of the mandarin duck killed by a hunter upbraids him in a dream, and next day kills herself before his eyes. Anesaki, pp. 320-22, has, however, a happy ending to a tale of mandarin-duck lovers; the one freed by a servant rejoins its mate and assists both mate and servant.
Text from Aichi Densetsu Shu, p. 318.
A PATHETIC STORY is told concerning the bridge called Shiraki-bashi [White Wood Bridge] in Haruki-mura, Nishi Kasugai-gun. Once when Lord Todo of Tsu Castle crossed this bridge, he saw a pair of mandarin ducks swimming congenially on the water. For mere pleasure the lord shot one of them with a bow and arrow of white wood. One night soon after that he had a dream in which a pretty woman appeared and expressed her lamentation over the death of her husband, who had been shot to death by the lord.
The next year the lord passed across the same bridge again and this time also shot several mandarin ducks. When he picked up one of them casually, he saw that the bird had the head of the mandarin duck which he had killed there the year before.
"Then is this the female mandarin duck that lamented over the death of her mate in my dream last year?" thought Lord Todo. He felt pity for the birds and established a temple for the repose of the souls of the two mandarin ducks and called it Hakkyu-zan [Mt. White Bow] Enoo-ji [Mandarin Duck Temple]. The white-wood bow was kept in that temp'e.
The temple fell into decay afterwards and there are no traces of it now, but Shiraki Bridge still remains.
THE ORIGIN OF KAZO-JI ON MT. WOODEN PILLOW
This kind of religious legend explaining the origin of a temple or shrine is called an engi. Hearn relates temple legends in the chapter "A Pilgrimage to Enoshima" in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (V, ch. 4), saying: In nearly every celebrated temple little Japanese prints are sold, containing the history of the shrine, and its miraculous legends" (p. 78).
Text from Shimane-ken Kohi Densetsu Shu, Yatsuka-gun, pp. 18-21.
THE PRIEST WHO FOUNDED the temple of Kazo-ji on Makuragi-yama [Mt. Wooden Pillow] was High Priest Chigen. His former name was Mita Genta. He belonged to a family branch of Emperor Kammu but he was exiled to Oki Island. Then he wandered around many places and also went across to China. On the return voyage from China, his boat was attacked by a sudden storm. Then a dark cloud covered all the sea and nothing was visible except an object like a mountain at the edge of the cloud. Genta prayed to the god: "If there is a god in the mountain, may he guide this boat to the foot of the mountain. If this transpires, I will be converted and become a bonze."
Very strangely, a faint light began to glimmer in the direction of Kasaura. Genta thought this must be the sign of the god's mercy and he encouraged the boatmen to row as hard as possible to the light. So the boat arrived at Kasaura.
That night Genta climbed up the mountain, treading on the rocks and making his way through thorns. When he got to the top of the mountain, day began to dawn. He saw a pond on the mountain. As he was standing by the pond, a young woman appeared. Genta asked her: "Is there any god or man living on this mountain?" The girl answered: "Since ancient times no one has ever climbed this mountain. You are such a pious person that I have come here to ask you something."
Just then a young man suddenly appeared. This man and woman were the god and goddess of the mountain. The god lived in this pond and the goddess lived in another pond. But in the valley of this mountain lived the Buddha Yakushi, who should rightfully hold a higher place than these gods. So the gods said to Genta: "Please take Yakushi to the top of the mountain." And they took Genta to Yakushi and explained to him that Yakushi was formerly on the rock in the valley with the bodhisattva Miroku, but that Miroku was gone up to heaven. Genta asked them: "Where shall I install Yakushi?" "On the pond," said the gods. "But one cannot build a temple on a pond." "It does not matter, for we can make flat ground," answered the gods.
Just then a white bird flew away. They followed the bird down the valley. There stood a big rock on which was the statue of Yakushi. After Genta worshiped it, he went up the mountain again, carrying the statue. When he came to the pond, suddenly a thunderstorm broke out and the mountain peak collapsed and filled up the pond. Then the mountain gods appeared again and said: "This pond is called Daio-ike [Great King Pond] and the pond at the back of this mountain is Ryuoike [Dragon King Pond]. Now Daio-ike has been made into a flat ground, but Ryuo-ike will remain forever. If you suffer from the drought, pray for rain to this stone."
As soon as they finished these words, the two mountain gods disappeared.
Struck by a strange feeling, Genta was going to set the statue of Yakushi on the ground. The left knee of the statue was broken. Genta could not find anything to support the statue. He remembered the wooden pillow he always carried with him. He took it out and put it under the statue. Strange to say, it turned into a leg of the statue. As he was planting a sacred tree, the same white bird came flying there with ropes in its mouth, holding grasses in its claws. The bird placed these things before Genta. He made a hut with them.
Soon afterwards Genta went to Kyoto and visited St. Dengyo on Mt. Hiei to tell the whole story. Dengyo was moved by it; he gave him the name of High Priest Chigen and made him the founder of the temple.
PART TWO
MONSTERS
THE DEMONS of the Western world have by now become tame household possessions. We think of giants and ogres, goblins and sprites, and possibly unicorns and centaurs, as stock literary characters to entertain children. But in Japan the demons are still seen and talked about in the villages, and they take forms astonishing to the Western mind. The kappa appears ridiculous rather than monstrous, with his boyish form and saucer head, but his actions are far too lethal for comedy. The kappa has penetrated deeply into Japanese literature, art, and popular culture. The brilliant novelist Ryunosuke Akutagawa wrote a mordant satire, Kappa, in 1927, the year he committed suicide, about a man captured by and forced to live with kappa. Another distinguished writer, Ashihei Hino, launched his career by winning the Akutagawa Prize and has published a voluminous miscellany of kappa stories, Kappa Mandara, grafting modern personalities onto the goblin. A comic cartoon series by Kon Shimizu in the Asahi Weekly depicts a nuked kangaroo type kappa of lecherous and unseemly behavior. Coffeehouses portray kappa on their checks, and craftsmen shape him into wooden dolls. Almost equally infamous is the flying tengu, a beaked and winged old man, haunting the mountains as kappa infest the rivers, and abducting humans in the Noh and Kabuki of dramatists and monogatari of story-writers, as well as in the legends of the people. Kappa and tengu are not all bad and can teach healing and swordplay to human benefactors.
The oni is an ogre of Chinese origin, usually pictured with horns and fangs and a loincloth of tiger's fur. But to the primitive Japanese he was a friendly mountain giant who requited hospitality with faggots and stamped his footprints in mountain hollows. Other eerie monsters are found all over Japan, wild men of the mountains, apes in the sea, mischievous imps in the house, garden spiders that grow gigantic at night. And they are really seen, for the demons of Japan have not yet escaped from the folk to the pages of nursery books.
THE KAPPA OF FUKIURA
"The kappa is a fabulous creature of the rivers, ponds, lakes, and the sea," writes Shiojiri in his introduction to his translation of Akutagawas Kappa. Shiojiri goes on to quote from dictionaries and travel books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which describe the kappa as an ugly child with greenish-yellow skin, webbed fingers and toes, resembling a monkey with his long nose and round eyes, wearing a shell like a tortoise, fishy smelling, naked. He is said to live in the water and come out evenings to steal melons and cucumbers. He likes to wrestle, will rape women, sucks the blood of cows and horses through their anuses, and drags men and women into the water to pluck out their livers through their anuses. The trick on meeting a kappa is to make him spill the water in his concave head, whereupon he loses his strength.
Typical kappa legends, like the present one, deal with the creature's attempt to drag a cow or horse into a river. A comparative ethnological study of this theme showing similar accounts of water monsters in Asia and Europe, by Eiichiro Ishida, has been translated into English as "The Kappa Legend," Folklore Studies (Peking, 1950), IX, pp. 1-152. The Minzokugaku Jiten, Joly (p. 161) and Mockjoya (I, pp. 196-98), all discuss kappa. Joly writes (p. 22) that kappa are usually propitiated by throwing cucumbers bearing the names and ages of one's family into the river. The contemporary vogue of kappa was described briery by Lewis Bush in the Asahi Evening News, Tokyo, May 29,1957, "The 'Kappa' — Japan's Goblin."
Ikeda,p. 43, suggests Type 47-C, "Water-monster captured, dragged by a horse" for the kappa traditions, and on the basis of her index Thompson has added Motif K1022.2.1, "Water-monster, trying to pull horse into water, is dragged to house where he begs for his life and is spared." Ikeda says that the affidavit given by the kappa, promising to do no more mischief, is treasured in some families.
Text from Bungo Densetsu Shu, pp. 76-77. Collected by Shizuka Otome.
IN FORMER DAYS a kappa often appeared to trouble the villagers of Fukiura in Nishi Nakaura-mura. One time the kappa came out of the river to the beach where a cow was tied to a tree. The kappa tried to insert his hand into the cow's anus and draw out its tongue. This startled the cow, which started to run round and round the tree, and in so doing caused its rope to wind round and round the kappa's arm. A farmer working in a nearby rice field noticed the kappa's plight and came running to the spot. Afraid of being caught by the farmer, the kappa tried to escape in such desperate haste that his arm, around which the rope was tightly wound, was pulled from his shoulder and fell to the ground. The farmer picked it up and carried it home.
That night the kappa called at the farmer's house and said: "Please give me back my arm that you took today. If you do not let me have it within the next three days, I cannot join it again to my shoulder." After imploring the farmer in this fashion he went away. The next night he came again, and the third night he appeared once more and repeated the same petition so piteously, with tears in his eyes, that the farmer felt sorry for him. He said: "Will you promise us that you will never do harm to the villagers, either the children or the adults? I will give you back your arm if you will keep your promise until the buttocks of the stone Jizo over there rot away."
The kappa made this promise to the farmer, and in consequence was able to depart with his arm. After that he went to the stone Jizo every night and examined its buttocks to see if they were rotted, but they showed no sign of going bad. He sprinkled excrement on the Jizo, but still it failed to rot, and the kappa at last grew disappointed and gave up all further attempts.
Even today people in summertime sometimes hear the voice of the kappa from the sea, saying: "Don't let the children go out to the beach, for the guest is coming." By the guest he means the kappa from Kawajiri. As the kappa from this other village is not bound by the promise of the kappa who lost his arm in Fukiura, the latter warns against the coming of the former.
So it is said that children have never been injured in the river or at the seashore of this village.
THE KAPPA OF KODA POND
The legend of the wooden-bowl lender is described in the Minzokugaku Jiten under "Wankashi densetsu" as extending all over Japan from southern Kyushu to northern Tohoku. Some families even claim descent from the dishonest man who refused to return the bowls to the kappa and say they still have those bowls (zenwan). The article cites a Chinese legend of borrowing bowls from a mountain fox, and a French story of borrowing a pan from a mound. Kitami Toshio has analyzed 150 such legends in Japan, finding them concentrated near important rivers (Folklore Studies, XIV, Tokyo, 1955, pp. 258-59).
In Murai, pp. 11-12, "Kappa Who Repaid Kindness," the story begins like the present one but the kappa leaves his liberator fish rather than bowls. In Yanagita-Mayer, Japanese Folk Tales, no. 54, pp. 155-57, "Mototori (Clearing-the-Old-Score) Mountain," a greedy farmer keeps tray sets borrowed from a mountain cave; his six-year-old son cannot walk, until one day he stands up and carries two rice bags back to the cave as compensation.
Text from Chiisagata-gun Mintah Shu, pp. 61-62.
THERE WAS a kappa in Koda Pond in Junin-mura. Saito Bunji of that village tied his horse to a tree by that pond. The kappa came out of the pond and took the reins and began to pull the horse into the pond. The frightened horse jumped up and ran back home and entered the stable. As the water in the kappa's head had been spilled, the kappa lost his strength and was dragged by the horse into the stable. When Bunji came to see the horse, the kappa made apologies to him and said: "Please forgive me. If you prepare a feast in your home, I will certainly lend you necessary bowls." So Bunji forgave him.
From then on, any time he held a feast, the bowls were prepared in the yard the night before. After he had used them, he put them in the yard and they disappeared during the night. However, one time a neighbor hid a set of the bowls when the rest were being returned to the kappa. The kappa took them during the night, but he never again lent bowls to Bunji.
THE KAPPA WHO PLAYED "PULL-FINGER"
The kappa is seen here in two more of his favorite roles, an evil water creature who devours humans, and a helpful one who sets their broken bones.
Text from Chiisagata-gun Mintan Shu, pp. 10-11.
THERE IS a pond called Akanuma-ike at the foot of Mt. Tateshina, and near the pond there is a big stone called Kagihiki-ishi [Pull-Finger Stone]. Once a child used to stand on that stone and called to the passers-by: "Let's play Pull-finger." The passers-by would stop and play Pull-finger for fun. Then the child would pull them into the pond and eat them up. Many people were killed in that way. At last the people decided that the child must be a kappa who lived in the pond.
A man named Tachiki from Suwa said: "I will destroy the kappa." He asked his lord if he could borrow a good horse. Then he rode by this stone, and as he expected, the child asked him to play Pull-finger. He answered the child: "All right." And they locked fingers. No sooner had they locked fingers than he whipped the horse and rode as fast as he could. The child could not bear to be dragged by the horse. He said: "Please excuse me, I am really the kappa of Akanuma Pond. Please don't kill me. Then I will teach you the secret of bonesetting." And the man said: "Then teach me that secret."
The kappa taught him in detail. "Because you've taught me the secret of bonesetting, I will set you free. But if you continue to live in this place, you might have the desire to eat people again. So go somewhere else tonight," said the man. So the kappa went away to the pond of Wada-mura and he has been living there quietly.
