The Tōno Tall Man

Kunio Yanagita (July 31, 1875 - August 8, 1962) is widely considered to be the father of Japanese folkloristics, and published his famous book, *Tōno Monogatari*, in 1910. This book was a compilation of short ghost stories he had recorded from the people in the city of Tōno in the Iwate Prefecture of Japan - and among its many intriguing accounts of firsthand encounters with ghosts and ghouls of local folklore - there are three stories on which I am going to be focusing today. They seem to suggest that there was a brief period in which a bizarre entity was active in the town, resembling a ghostly humanoid capable of scaling sheer walls and stretching its neck to grotesque lengths.

## The Servant's Story

I can't imagine that life for Mr. Chozoh was very restful. While Yanagita was patrolling the town to find ghost stories, he was roughly seventy years old and was considered to be healthy - and had worked as a household servant for one Mr. Chozaburoh Tajiri in his younger days. Tajiri lived in a house which one can presume to have been rather sizeable (he did have at least one servant, after all) and was stated to have a front gate facing Ohzuchi Street. This street seemingly no longer exists. It was during his stint of working for Mr. Tajiri that he would have an encounter with the supernatural. On the night in question, he had been staying out late and so he ended up venturing back towards his master's house under the light of the moon. As he walked towards the front gate, he noticed a man wearing a snow-cape coming towards the gate from the opposite direction. This man suddenly stopped his approach and shot a glare at Chozoh, before turning and seemingly stepping right through a tight hedge into a nearby field.

This hedge was apparently so tightly-compacted that it should've been impossible for anyone to enter the field that way according to Chozoh. When he investigated the area of the hedge through which the mystery man had stepped, Chozoh was horrified to find that the foliage was completely undisturbed. It seemed as if the man had been a ghost. Panicked, he ran inside and told his master about the event. A short while after, he would learn that a friend of his who had been living in Niihari Village of the Ibaraki Prefecture (which ceased to exist in 2006 when it was absorbed into the city of Tsuchiura) had been thrown from his horse and had died at approximately the same time as he had seen the mysterious figure. It is thus not an unreasonable assumption to guess that the entity seen by Chozoh was some kind of crisis apparition - but this might seem unlikely in light of an event which was revealed to have happened to Chozoh's father some years earlier...

## The Telescopic Creeper

The strangeness of this story ramps up sharply when the bizarre entity seen by Chozoh's father is taken into account. Chozoh senior and his wife Ostune had also worked as servants for the Tajiri family - and on one morning he was just coming back to his master's house after a night out. He came into the house through the front door, and caught sight of a strange man stood on the open verandah (porch) with his hand tucked into his bosom and his face obscured from vision. Chozoh became suspicious that this man was trying to enter Otsune's bedroom in order to make love to her - and this fear quickly evolved into anger which prompted him to step up to confront the mysterious figure. The figure was now aware that he had been spotted, of course, but instead of running away like a potential pervert might've been expected to - he trudged slowly back towards the front gate. Furious, Chozoh now believed that the intruder was mocking him, and so moved as to block his way to the front gate. The man simply started walking backwards towards the house again, without ever removing his hand from his bosom as he moved. Suddenly, he was 'swallowed up' into the crevice between the two doors of the house. There was an outer door, and then an inner shoji door (a paper sliding door).

Assuming that the man must've simply elected to get into the house through the paper door, Chozoh chased after him and thrust his hand into the space between the doors and found that the shoji was closed. Stumbling backwards in confusion and turning away from the door, he was horrified to suddenly spy the same bizarre man pressed to the outer wall of the house staring down at him. The head of the grotesque apparition now dangled unsettlingly over Chozoh while it leered down at him with bulging eyes which were so far out of their sockets that they almost touched Chozoh's head. Its neck had extended unnaturally. It is unclear what happened next, but I would say that it is reasonable to assume that Chozoh ran away from the scene, screaming in bewildered terror.

## Dead Men Tell Tales

Mr. Mankichi Maekawa's legacy is one more story to add to this collection of encounters with a bizarre wall-crawling entity. He had died a few years before the publication of *Tōno Monogatari* - and he was only thirty when he met his maker. Yanagita seems to imply that Maekawa's encounter with the stretchy stranger creeping around the neighbourhood may been some kind of omen. Sometime during his last two or three years on the planet, Maekawa had chosen to stay in town late into the night. It was June, and the moon was bright in the sky above the Unozaki, Tochinai (I've been unable to dig up anything about this location). Maekawa was walking back home, and had reached the perimeter of his garden when he paused for a moment to look at his house. He soon realised that there was a figure clinging to the wall, quite high up off the ground. It seemed to be nodding its head. Flabbergasted at the bizarre sight, he fell ill shortly after his encounter.

## The Waiting Priest

Oddly enough, there is at least some degree of Japanese folkloric precedent for encounters with entities with telescopic necks. There is of course the story of the tricksterish Rokurokubi, which are women whose necks extend to bizarre lengths while they sleep, allowing their separately sentient heads to roam around and lick up lamp oil or even attack small animals. The Mikoshi Nyūdō, however, is the most fearsome of long-necked Japanese monsters - it is a shapeshifter which will appear as an unassuming priest to travelers along lonely roads before growing to monstrous heights and extending their necks even further if they are observed by these travelers. As the travelers look up at the growing creatures, they will get taller and taller until their victims can't look upwards any further. At this point, their victims usually fall backwards and the monsters will lunge forward to bite their throats out. Although neither of these creatures fit the description of the Tōno entity, their existence in Japanese folklore proves that there is a pre-existing concept of monstrous creatures with telescopic necks in the region.

## Sources

'*Tōno Monogatari*' by Kunio Yanagito

'*Mikoshi Nyūdō*' on Yokai.com

'*Rokurokubi*' on Yokai.com

'*Kunio Yanagito*' on Wikipedia