Konaki-jiji

Also Known As: 子泣き爺 / 児啼爺, “the old man who cries like a child”; also Konaki-jijii; identified by Yanagita with the Shikoku gogyanaki, ゴギャ啼き
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It cries in the mountains with the voice of a newborn, and the moment it is lifted out of pity it turns unbearably heavy and cannot be put down.
Role in Mythos: A mountain yōkai of the Tokushima uplands whose whole method is to punish compassion, and whose modern fame rests on a single line in a 1938 folklore journal.
Relation to Humans: It kills only people who stop to help it, which means it cannot touch anyone who walks past a crying baby on a mountain road at night. In the district the tradition supposedly came from, the name was chiefly used by parents to frighten misbehaving children.

The Yoshino river cuts a gorge through western Tokushima so steep that the villages cling to the slopes above it like nests, and in spring and autumn the fog comes up the valley and fills it to about the eighth station of the mountain, so that a man walking home at dusk is walking on an island in a white sea. Sound carries strangely through that. A baby is crying somewhere below the path. There is no house below the path.

The folklorist Yanagita Kunio set the creature down in June 1938, in the journal Minkan Denshō, in an entry short enough to read in a breath. The konakijiji lives deep in the mountains. It looks like an old man but it makes the crying of a newborn. If you feel sorry for it and lift it up, it grows suddenly heavy, and when you try to let go you find you cannot, and in the end it takes your life. That is the whole of it. Nine lines in a wartime folklore magazine, and out of them came one of the most recognisable monsters in Japan.

Yanagita added that a thing called gogyanaki was said to be the same creature. In Kōchi they described it as a pale white infant that fastens itself to the legs of anyone walking a night road, though it will let go if you take off your straw sandals. In the Kiyahira district of Mima it was a one-legged thing that roamed the mountains crying gogya, gogya, and when it cried the ground shook. Hopping, wailing, and seismic: the yōkai of the Shikoku interior are not tidy.

The trap is elegant because it uses nothing but the victim’s own decency. Wet leaf litter, the cold coming up off the river, a sound no one can walk away from. You crouch, you gather it up, and for a moment there is a light bundle in your arms and a wrinkled face looking back at you that is not a baby’s face. Then the weight arrives. Not gradually. It settles into your forearms like wet stone, and your knees give, and your fingers have already stopped being yours.

Now the honest part, which is stranger than the monster.

The report that started all this was made by Takeda Akira, one of Yanagita’s collectors, who wrote up the folk vocabulary of the Shikoku mountains and published it in the same journal five months later. His note on the creature is a single line. A thing that imitates the crying of a child. No old man. No weight. No death. The killing that made the konaki-jiji famous is not in the field record at all, and Yanagita himself seems to have known it, because in the great folk-vocabulary compendium his institute published in 1955 the clinging and the crushing weight are compared to the obariyon, who leaps onto your back, and to the ubume, who asks you to hold her baby, and are marked down as invention.

Nobody in the mountains ever told this story.

The local historian Takita Masahiro, who went looking for it in Tokushima, could not find a konaki-jiji legend anywhere in the district that was supposed to be its home. What he found instead were two separate things that had been standing near each other for a long time. The old tale collections of Kiyahira do contain a mountain creature that cries with an unpleasant infant’s voice, and they contain, quite separately, a thing that becomes too heavy to release once you have picked it up. And in the very hamlet the 1938 report came from, there had been a real man, an old man, who wandered about making a weird noise like a baby crying, and who was so unnerving to children that parents used his name as a threat when they wanted a child to behave. Somewhere between that old man, those two folk motifs, a collector’s shorthand and an editor’s pen in Tokyo, a monster assembled itself.

Mizuki Shigeru finished the job. He read Yanagita, as he read Yanagita for the nurikabe and the sunakake-baba, and he did the one thing the written record had never done: he drew it. Where Yanagita described only a voice and an old man’s shape, Mizuki produced a squat figure in a straw mino, wide-eyed, gap-toothed, permanently mid-howl, and then made him a hero. In Gegege no Kitarō the konaki-jiji is not a killer but one of Kitarō’s most dependable allies, and generations of Japanese children grew up on him. The invisible local phenomenon became a national character, which is roughly what happened to every yōkai Mizuki touched.

The final turn is the best one. In 2001 Takita and a group of local volunteers formally identified Yamashiro, a mountain town in the gorge where Awa, Tosa and Iyo meet, as the birthplace of the tradition. Money came in from all over the country. A stone statue of the creature was put up in the Fujikawa valley, and beside it a stele carrying an inscription in the handwriting of the novelist and yōkai scholar Kyōgoku Natsuhiko, who has argued in print that the konaki-jiji’s existence is, folklorically speaking, extremely doubtful, and that this no longer matters, because everyone now agrees it is a yōkai. The town holds a yōkai festival every November. In 2008 the World Yōkai Association, whose first chairman was Mizuki, certified Yamashiro as a piece of heritage worth passing on. There is a weathered konaki-jiji standing on the platform at Ōboke station, meeting the trains.

So the powers are these. A voice that can be heard through fog and running water and that no ordinary person can ignore. A body that can convert, at the instant of contact, from the weight of an infant to something closer to the weight of the mountain. A grip that works both ways, since the horror is not that it holds you but that you cannot make your hands open. And behind them all, the strange durable power of a thing that got itself written into a book and then talked its way into being real.

The limits follow just as neatly. It cannot come to you. It cannot make you stop. Walk on, and it stays where it is, crying into the dark at nobody, for as long as it takes.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Konaki-jiji?

The Konaki-jiji is a Japanese mountain yōkai from the Tokushima region of Shikoku, described as an old man who cries with the voice of a newborn baby. Anyone who takes pity on the crying and picks it up finds that it becomes crushingly heavy and impossible to release, and the victim is killed. It was first written up by the folklorist Yanagita Kunio in 1938.

Is the Konaki-jiji a real folk legend or was it invented?

Both, in an unusual way. The oldest record, a 1938 field note by the collector Takeda Akira, says only that there is “a thing that imitates the crying of a child” and mentions no old man, no weight and no killing. Yanagita’s fuller version added the fatal weight, and he himself later compared that detail to the obariyon and ubume traditions and called it a fabrication. Local research in Tokushima has found no surviving konaki-jiji legend in the district at all.

How do you survive a Konaki-jiji?

Do not pick it up. The creature cannot approach or seize a traveller by itself, so its only route to a victim is the victim’s own compassion, and walking past the crying leaves it powerless. The related Kōchi creature gogyanaki, which clings to the legs of night walkers, is said to let go if you take off your straw sandals.

What does the Konaki-jiji look like?

The only detail in the folklore is that it has the appearance of an old man and the voice of an infant. The familiar image of a bald, bug-eyed old man in a straw rain cape was created by the manga artist Mizuki Shigeru, who was the first person to draw the creature; before him there was no picture of it, only a description.

Why is there a Konaki-jiji statue in Tokushima?

In 2001, local volunteers and the historian Takita Masahiro identified the mountain town of Yamashiro, in the Ōboke gorge, as the birthplace of the tradition, and a stone statue was erected in the Fujikawa valley with donations from around Japan, alongside a stele inscribed in the hand of the writer Kyōgoku Natsuhiko. The town now holds an annual yōkai festival, and in 2008 it was certified as yōkai heritage by the World Yōkai Association.