Tōno Monogatari

In 1908 and 1909 a young man from Tōno named Sasaki Kizen told the stories of his home district to Yanagita Kunio in Tokyo, and in 1910 Yanagita printed 119 of them, numbered, in plain prose, with the names of the houses and the people. The zashiki-warashi who live in old houses and leave before the house falls; kappa in the river with red faces; women taken into the mountains by something that made them its wives; the mountain men and mountain women; the dead returning on the night of the Bon festival.

The book sold a few hundred copies and became the founding text of Japanese folklore studies, because it treated the strange tales of one district as material to be set down exactly. The records library on this site works the same way, one telling at a time.