Mujina

On the Akasaka Road, in Tōkyō, there is a slope called Kii-no-kuni-zaka,—which means the Slope of the Province of Kii. I do not know why it is called the Slope of the Province of Kii. On one side of this slope you see an ancient moat, deep and very wide, with high green banks rising up to some place of gardens;—and on the other side of the road extend the long and lofty walls of an imperial palace. Before the era of street-lamps and jinrikishas, this neighborhood was very lonesome after dark; and belated pedestrians would go miles out of their way rather than mount the Kii-no-kuni-zaka, alone, after sunset.

All because of a Mujina that used to walk there.

The last man who saw the Mujina was an old merchant of the Kyōbashi quarter, who died about thirty years ago. This is the story, as he told it:—

One night, at a late hour, he was hurrying up the Kii-no-kuni-zaka, when he perceived a woman crouching by the moat, all alone, and weeping bitterly. Fearing that she intended to drown herself, he stopped to offer her any assistance or consolation in his power. She appeared to be a slight and graceful person, handsomely dressed; and her hair was arranged like that of a young girl of good family. “O-jochū,” he exclaimed, approaching her,—“O-jochū, do not cry like that!… Tell me what the trouble is; and if there be any way to help you, I shall be glad to help you.” (He really meant what he said; for he was a very kind man.) But she continued to weep,—hiding her face from him with one of her long sleeves. “O-jochū,” he said again, as gently as he could,—“please, please listen to me!… This is no place for a young lady at night! Do not cry, I implore you!—only tell me how I may be of some help to you!” Slowly she rose up, but turned her back to him, and continued to moan and sob behind her sleeve. He laid his hand lightly upon her shoulder, and pleaded:—“O-jochū!—O-jochū!—O-jochū!… Listen to me, just for one little moment!… O-jochū!—O-jochū!”… Then that O-jochū turned around, and dropped her sleeve, and stroked her face with her hand;—and the man saw that she had no eyes or nose or mouth,—and he screamed and ran away.

Up Kii-no-kuni-zaka he ran and ran; and all was black and empty before him. On and on he ran, never daring to look back; and at last he saw a lantern, so far away that it looked like the gleam of a firefly; and he made for it. It proved to be only the lantern of an itinerant soba-seller, who had set down his stand by the road-side; but any light and any human companionship was good after that experience; and he flung himself down at the feet of the soba-seller, crying out, “Ah!—aa!!—aa!!!”…

“Koré! koré!” roughly exclaimed the soba-man. “Here! what is the matter with you? Anybody hurt you?”

“No—nobody hurt me,” panted the other,—“only… Ah!—aa!”

“—Only scared you?” queried the peddler, unsympathetically. “Robbers?”

“Not robbers,—not robbers,” gasped the terrified man… “I saw… I saw a woman—by the moat;—and she showed me… Ah! I cannot tell you what she showed me!”…

“Hé! Was it anything like THIS that she showed you?” cried the soba-man, stroking his own face—which therewith became like unto an Egg… And, simultaneously, the light went out.

About the author

Lafcadio Hearn led one of the most unlikely lives in literature. He was born in 1850 on the Greek island of Lefkada, to a Greek mother and an Irish father, brought up largely in Dublin, and sent to America as a young man with almost nothing. He worked as a newspaper reporter in Cincinnati and New Orleans, spent time in the French Caribbean, and in 1890 travelled to Japan. He stayed for the rest of his life, married into a Japanese family, became a Japanese citizen under the name Koizumi Yakumo, and taught English literature at Tokyo Imperial University. Kwaidan, his collection of Japanese ghost stories, appeared in 1904, the year he died.

Behind the story

“Mujina” is the shortest piece in Kwaidan, little more than a page. It is a retelling of a type of tale well known in Japanese folklore: the encounter with a nopperabō, a faceless ghost, here attributed to a mujina, a badger-like animal that in folk belief could change its shape to fool people. Hearn sets the story on the Kii-no-kuni-zaka, a real slope in the Akasaka district of Tokyo, and frames it as something that happened to an old merchant on his way home at night.

Why it still works

It’s built like a joke, and that’s exactly why it frightens. A man walking alone at night finds a young woman crouched by a moat, weeping. He tries to comfort her. She turns, and her face is smooth and blank, “like unto an Egg.” He runs, and finally sees the lantern of a roadside soba-seller. He gasps out his story, and the soba-man asks whether it was anything like this, and strokes his own face into the same blankness. Then the light goes out.

The structure is a double punch, and the second is worse than the first. The first scare is a ghost. The second is the collapse of the one place of safety. Every horror reader knows the moment of reaching the light, the other person, the ordinary world. Hearn lets the merchant reach it, makes him (and us) relax, and then takes it away. The last sentence, five words long, isn’t even about the ghost. It’s about the dark.

The facelessness is important too. A monstrous face would give us something to describe; no face gives us nothing. It is the absence of the one feature that tells us we’re dealing with another person, and the egg simile is so plain, so domestic, that it gets past our defences.

On a reread

The man’s kindness. He stops because a stranger is in distress, and the ghost uses that.
How Hearn handles speech. The merchant’s panic breaks into fragments and dashes; the soba-man’s reply is almost lazy, and that’s part of the cruelty.
The moat and the slope. Hearn’s precise setting makes the tale feel reported rather than invented.
The title. It names the trickster, a shapeshifting animal, which makes the whole encounter into a prank of sorts. That doesn’t make it any less frightening.

If this got under your skin

Hearn’s Yuki-Onna and The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hōïchi are longer, sadder tales from the same book. Saki’s The Open Window is another tiny story built like a trap. And our original Please Stay on the Line follows a son trying to cancel his late father’s landline, put on hold by a system that won’t give up.