Inugami

A dog is buried at a crossroads with only its head above the dirt, and food is set down just past the reach of its tongue. It is left like that. When the animal is nearly dead of hunger and half mad with the smell, the head is struck off, and the head is meant to fly at the bowl and bite. The body is burned, the bones go into a jar, and the jar is given a place in the house and worshipped.

That is one recipe. Ishizuka Takatoshi, who spent a career on Japan’s possessing spirits, recorded others beside it. In one, the severed head of a starved dog goes under a busy crossing so that hundreds of feet grind over it day after day until the grudge inside has soured into something a person can aim. In another, dogs are set on each other, the survivor is given fish, its head is taken, and the maker eats the rest of the fish. These were written down as things people in western Japan were said to do, not as episodes in a tale, and the difference matters.

The result is an inugami, written with the characters for dog and for god. It belongs to a wider body of imported curse-craft called kodoku, borrowed from Chinese gu magic and pushed to the wrong side of the law early in Japan’s written history, which did nothing to stop villagers suspecting their neighbours were still at it. Belief settled hardest in eastern Ōita, in Shimane, and in Kōchi on Shikoku, with traces running through Yamaguchi and the whole of Kyushu, past the Satsunan islands, as far as Okinawa. Shikoku has no native foxes, and the island is often argued to be where the dog took the fox’s job.

Nothing in the descriptions looks like a dog. That is the strangest thing about it. People who claimed to know put it at about the size of a mouse, or a weasel, mole-like enough that its eyes could not be found, moving in single file with others of its kind. Ōita made it close to a shrew. In Toyooka it was a weasel spotted black and white. On Aishima in Yamaguchi they were called inugami mice and counted at seventy-five to a house. On the mountain at Iyayama in Tokushima they were said to run a little larger than mice and to sit warming themselves at the hearth. Asai Ryōi, writing in 1666, gave the inugami of Tosa a body the length of a grain of rice, patched black and white among other colours. The kokugaku scholar Oka Kumaomi made it a foot long and shaped like a bat. Set the accounts beside one another and what they resemble is not a dog at all but the fox-spirits of the same folk tradition, the kuda-gitsune and the osaki.

Where the whole species came from is less settled than how a single one is made. One story has the nue that Minamoto no Yorimasa shot down over the palace burst into four pieces, which flew off to separate provinces to become the dog god, the snake god and the monkey god. Another has it begin as a picture: Kōbō Daishi painted a dog to keep boars out of the fields, and the painting got up and carried on. In another telling, Gennō Shinshō shatters the killing stone, and the fragments that come down in Kōzuke become osaki while the ones that reach Shikoku become inugami. None of it squares with a dog buried at a crossroads, and nobody seems to have minded.

Families kept them in the chests of drawers, under the floorboards, and in the water jars. In the Komatsu area of Ehime the arithmetic was simple: a household had as many inugami as it had people, and the number climbed as the family grew. They were said to pick up what the house wanted without being told, and to go and see to it.

The Miyoshi district office wrote its local history in 1924 and set down what people there said about the women of such houses, because the spirit was held to descend through the mother and to leave the men untouched. A woman of an inugami line has only to feel something. She passes a doorway, catches the smell of cooking, thinks that she would like some, and her living spirit is already inside the house. Envy did it, anger did it, and so did falling in love at first sight, which is why handsome men were told to be careful.

The same account describes the far end of that. Fever comes on suddenly. The person cannot stand. Speech goes loose and wandering, and by the finish they are down on all fours going round the house barking. Elsewhere the possessed were said to feel a crushing weight in the chest and aching arms and legs, to sway without warning, to turn jealous, and to eat enormously. In Tokushima the bodies of those who died of it were said to carry tooth marks. It did not confine itself to people, either. Cattle and horses could be taken, and so could objects, and a saw with an inugami in it will not cut.

Being named as an inugami household was not a matter of reputation alone. Roughly fifteen families per village carried the accusation on average, and it carried them out of marriage and out of ordinary village dealing for generations. Across Shikoku it was customary to have a prospective spouse’s line checked before an engagement went ahead, and the practice tangled itself into the wider machinery of Japanese social discrimination. Komatsu Kazuhiko traced the accusations back to the middle ages and found them resting on land and farming rather than on anything supernatural. The wealth was the tell. A house doing unusually well was a house with something helping it.

At Yamaga in Ōita a miko is on record cutting dog heads by that method, drying the maggots that gathered on them, and selling the result as inugami to grateful customers. Foxes in this tradition could at least be enshrined and thanked for the money they brought in. The dog rarely got that courtesy. It was filed under curse.

There is one place to go about it. Kenmi shrine stands up in the mountains at Terano in Yamashiro, in Miyoshi city in Tokushima, close to where three prefectures meet, and it belongs to no Shinto organisation. It advertises itself as the only shrine in the country able to take an inugami off a person. The priest chants in a form used nowhere else and works over the supplicant’s head and shoulders with a kinpei, a purification wand made in gold rather than paper with small bells fixed at the ends, so the whole rite runs on a thin continuous ringing. Andrea De Antoni sat there through 2016 and asked people why they had come. Most had driven more than an hour and a half. Most wanted health, or work, or examinations, or protection. Most did not believe in spirits at all and had come because nothing else had worked. Of everyone he spoke to, exactly one case was named as inugami: a couple in their fifties from Kōchi, monthly visitors for ten years, whose father’s eyes and temper changed without warning, whose hands and legs shook, who got nothing from doctors, and who would not come to the shrine himself because he thought it was nonsense. His son went in his place, did not believe it either, and reported that his father improved each time.

What the thing can do follows from what it is. It acts on unspoken feeling and needs no instruction. It crosses into cattle, horses and tools. It makes the house that keeps it rich. What it cannot do is leave. It is bound to the bloodline that made it, so it inherits the family’s enemies and the family inherits it, generation after generation, along with everything the village thinks. It is not reliably obedient, and there are accounts of inugami turning and biting their own household to death. It can be lifted by rite, which is what the bells at Kenmi are for. And on Tanegashima there was a way of moving one along: if a family with inugami was thought to have passed one into another house, they would carry food into that house, take the spirit back out with them, and go and live in a hut at the edge of town until the sick person recovered. Their descendants, it was said, stayed up in the mountains afterwards, alone.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an inugami?

An inugami is a dog spirit from the folklore of western Japan that is created by ritual rather than born. The rite involves starving and beheading a dog and then enshrining its remains, after which the spirit serves the household that made it. Belief in inugami was strongest on Shikoku and in Shimane and eastern Ōita.

What does an inugami look like?

Local descriptions of the inugami do not describe a dog. They put it at roughly the size of a mouse or a weasel, mole-like with eyes that cannot be seen, often patched black and white, and travelling in single file with others of its kind. An account written by Asai Ryōi in 1666 gave the inugami of Tosa a body no longer than a grain of rice.

What is an inugami-mochi?

An inugami-mochi is a family said to keep an inugami, inheriting the spirit down the generations along with the wealth it was believed to bring. Roughly fifteen families per village on average carried the accusation, and it shut them out of marriage and everyday village life. In Shikoku it was customary to have a prospective spouse’s family line checked before a match was agreed.

What are the symptoms of inugami possession?

Accounts describe sudden fevers, an inability to stand, shivering hands and legs, wandering speech, and finally barking like a dog and crawling around the house on all fours. Other descriptions add a crushing weight in the chest, aching limbs, sudden swaying, jealousy and an enormous appetite. Doctors were held to be no use against it.

How is inugami possession cured?

Inugami possession is treated by exorcism rather than medicine. Kenmi shrine in Tokushima Prefecture specialises in it and advertises itself as the only shrine in Japan able to remove an inugami, using prayers chanted in a form found nowhere else and a gold wand called a kinpei with small bells fixed at its ends. Many visitors report that their symptoms improve afterwards even when they do not believe in spirits.

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