Zashiki-warashi (座敷童子): The Child Spirit of Old Tōno Houses

What is Zashiki-warashi?

In the house of Imabuchi Kanjūrō, in Iide in the village of Tsuchibuchi, a daughter home on holiday from the girls’ high school came round a corner of the corridor and ran straight into a boy she had never seen. He was a boy; there was no doubt about that. There was also no one he could have been.

In the Sasaki house in Yamaguchi, a mother sat sewing alone when she heard paper rustling in the next room — her husband’s room, and he was away in Tokyo. She slid the door open. Nothing. She sat down again, and after a while came the sound of someone sniffing. Then she knew: the zashiki-warashi.

Both stories were told in Tōno and written down by Yanagita Kunio in 1909, and published in Tōno Monogatari in 1910 as tale 17, which ends with the sentence that matters: the house where this god lives has wealth and standing.

What does zashiki-warashi mean?

Zashiki is the parlour — the formal tatami room of a traditional house, where guests are received. Warashi is an old word for a child. Zashiki- warashi is “the child of the parlour,” and tale 17 calls it a kami, a god, not a ghost.

The name places it precisely: not in the kitchen or the barn, but in the best room, where a family keeps what it is proud of.

Appearance

A child of twelve or thirteen, most often. Nothing about it glows or floats or distorts; the Imabuchi boy was simply a boy where no boy should be. Other houses saw other things. In Karumai, in the north of Iwate, the zashiki- warashi was a god of wealthy houses that could not be seen at all. In Jōbōji, children playing round the kotatsu at New Year found one more child among them than there should have been — the one who had gone out to the toilet was somehow still sitting there — and the rule they knew was that when the same person is in two places, it is the zashiki-warashi.

Our illustration follows tale 17: a boy of about twelve in a dark indigo kimono, barefoot, in an ordinary lamplit corridor. The small child in a bright red kimono that appears on every poster is a modern convention.

Behavior and abilities

• It is met in corridors. Briefly, and gone.
• It makes small sounds in empty rooms. Paper rustling; someone sniffing.
• It brings fortune. The house it lives in flourishes.

It does not chase, curse, or harm. It is less an intruder than a small resident god, and the family’s wish is not to be rid of it but to keep it.

The house that lost its children

Tale 18 is the other half of the story, and it is why the first half matters.

Zashiki-warashi can be girls, and the old house of Yamaguchi Magozaemon was long said to have two of them. One year a man from the village, coming back from town, met two beautiful girls he did not recognise at the Tomeba bridge, walking toward him with a troubled look. Where had they come from? From Magozaemon’s, they said. Where were they going? To another house, in a village some way off — a house that is still a prosperous farm today. The man thought: so Magozaemon’s time is over.

Not long after, the master and household of Magozaemon’s, more than twenty people, ate mushrooms gathered round the pear tree and died in a single day. One seven-year-old girl survived, because she had been out playing and forgot to come home for lunch. She lived to old age, had no children, and died not long before the tale was told. Relatives came and took everything down to the miso, and the oldest house in the village was gone in a morning.

The spirit did not kill anyone. It left. In Tōno in 1985 the same thought was still being said more plainly: the zashiki-warashi lives in old thatched houses, and when it goes, the family’s fortunes go down.

Weaknesses and countermeasures

There is nothing to drive out, and no one wants to. The folklore turns the usual question around. The risk is not how to get rid of the spirit; it is what it means when the spirit decides to go.

Documented tradition and later imagery

Documented tradition. A house spirit of old Tōno families, told to Yanagita Kunio in 1909 and printed in 1910: a boy of twelve or thirteen met in the Imabuchi corridor, sounds in an empty room of the Sasaki house, prosperity for the house it lives in; two girls who left the Magozaemon house shortly before its household died of mushroom poisoning; and, elsewhere in Iwate, an invisible god of rich houses, a doubled child at the kotatsu, and a family whose luck turns when it leaves.

Later imagery. Fiction and tourism have given the zashiki-warashi a mascot form — a small child in a red kimono with a bobbed haircut — and turned its fortune into a guarantee, with inns promising luck to any guest who sees one.

The 1910 spirit is never on display. A girl turns a corner and there is a boy. A woman hears paper move in a room with no one in it. And one day two unfamiliar girls walk out of the richest house in the village, and do not come back.