Okuri-inu

Also Known As: 送り犬, the escorting dog or sending dog; also called simply yamainu, 山犬, the mountain dog, and ōkami, 狼, the wolf; the wolf form is known from the Kantō region through the Kinki region and in Kōchi as okuri-ōkami, 送り狼, the escorting wolf; a smaller cousin on the Izu Peninsula and at Toda in Saitama is the okuri-itachi, 送り鼬, the escorting weasel
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It walks behind a person on a night mountain road and kills anyone who falls, while leaving anyone who stays on their feet, or convincingly pretends to have sat down on purpose, entirely unharmed.
Role in Mythos: It supplies the rule that governs walking a mountain pass after dark, and the reason a traveller who made it home had something to thank.
Relation to Humans: Its whole existence is an escort, and the escort runs in both directions at once, guarding the walker from everything else in the mountains while remaining the most immediate danger on the road. The tellings are unusually practical about it, since almost every version comes with an instruction for surviving the encounter rather than a moral about it.

The lantern reaches about four paces, and past that the cedars are a wall. Somewhere behind, just at the edge of hearing, something is keeping pace. Not gaining. Not falling back. It has been there since the foot of the pass, and it will be there at the top, and the only thing that matters between here and the village is staying upright.

Stories of the okuri-inu run from Tōhoku down to Kyushu, which makes it one of the most widely distributed beings in Japanese folklore and also one of the least standardised. In some districts it is a dog. In others it is plainly a wolf, and in much of western Japan it goes by yamainu, the mountain dog, a word that did duty for the wolf in ordinary speech. The core of it never shifts. Walk a mountain road at night and it falls in behind you. Fall over and it kills you.

The escape clause is what makes the creature memorable, and it is beautifully petty. A stumble is fatal; a rest is not. So a traveller who went down was supposed to land as though they had meant to, grunt *dokkoisho* the way a person does when they lower themselves onto a step, or sigh something about being tired and settle in for a moment. The beast, apparently, judges intention rather than posture. After that the local versions diverge in unhelpful directions. In some places it will shoulder into you to put you on the ground. In others the moment you go down a whole pack materialises out of nowhere and comes in at once.

There is etiquette at the far end too. Clear the pass safely and you were to say something to it, a goodbye or a word of thanks for the escort, and it would not follow you any further. Elsewhere the obligation followed you through your own door: wash your feet, give thanks for the safe road, and set out a dish for whatever had walked you home.

The oldest written notices are Edo-period and they concern the wolf. The *Honchō Shokkan*, the materia medica compiled by Hitomi Hitsudai and published in 1697, advises that if you do not fight the okuri-ōkami but plead for your life, it will keep the other beasts of the mountain off you. Terajima Ryōan’s *Wakan Sansai Zue* of 1712 is stranger and more specific. Its entry on the wolf describes the thing vaulting over the head of a night walker, over and over, and states that a person who is not frightened and does not resist takes no harm, while a person who panics and falls is bitten. It also records the one practical countermeasure anyone bothered to write down: the smell of a smouldering matchcord drives it off, which is why travellers in the hills carried one. Other accounts say much the same about tobacco, that a man who stops and calmly lights up will be walked to his gate, and that a favourite food or a single straw sandal left behind sends the escort home satisfied. The okuri-itachi of Izu is dealt with the same way, by throwing a sandal, which it takes in its teeth and carries off.

The best of the collected tales was written down by Koyama Mao in the *Chiisagata-gun Mindanshū*, published in Nagano in 1933. A woman from Shioda, in what is now Ueda, left her husband’s house to give birth at her family home. The labour caught her partway, on the mountain road, and she delivered there on the ground. After dark the okuri-inu came, several of them. She said what she could think of to say, which was that if they were going to eat her they had better eat her, and then nothing happened. They stayed. They kept the wolves of the mountain off her and the child through the night, and one of them went and came back dragging her husband. The family fed them red rice. In Koumi, in the Minami-Saku district of the same prefecture, the mountain dogs are sorted into two kinds on exactly this basis: the okuri-inu that guards you, and the mukae-inu, the welcoming dog, that does not.

Nobody ever says what it looks like. That absence is doing real work, because the animal underneath the story was never in doubt to the people telling it. The yōkai researcher Murakami Kenji has argued that the okuri-ōkami simply is the Japanese wolf, and that the whole supernatural apparatus is human interpretation laid over ordinary territorial behaviour: a wolf shadows an intruder to the boundary of its range without attacking, and reads a sudden fall or a sprint as something worth chasing. The folklore and the ethology fit each other uncomfortably well. The scientific name preserves the same idea by accident of scholarship. The Japanese wolf is *Canis lupus hodophilax*, from the Greek for path and for guard, the guardian of the way, and John Knight has pointed out that the taxonomy quietly enshrines the escort legend. In the Kii Peninsula uplands Knight recorded that the wolf’s nearness was known by ear rather than eye, through the chirring of the okurisuzume, the sending sparrow, a form the wolf was said to take. The same animal is enshrined at Mitsumine in Saitama as the messenger of the mountain deity, and its paper charms were carried across the country to keep boar out of the fields.

Its powers are all negative space. It does not speak, transform in front of you, curse a bloodline or demand anything. What it has is presence and the absolute reliability of its rule, and while it is behind you nothing else in the mountains will come near, which is the closest thing to protection the night road offers. Its limits are equally plain. Fire drives it off, courtesy satisfies it, a sandal buys it, and a person who keeps their nerve and their footing walks through the whole encounter untouched. The word outlived the wolf. Today an okuri-ōkami is a man who offers to see a woman home and has other plans for the doorstep, which is the old bargain reduced to its meanest possible form.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the okuri-inu?

The okuri-inu is a Japanese yōkai, a dog or wolf that follows people walking mountain roads at night. It is reported from Tōhoku to Kyushu and is also called yamainu, the mountain dog. It kills anyone who falls while it is following them and leaves anyone who stays upright alone.

How do you survive an okuri-inu?

Stay on your feet, and if you do go down, make it look deliberate by grunting *dokkoisho* as though sitting or sighing that you need a rest. Edo-period sources add that the smell of a smouldering matchcord drives it off, which is why mountain travellers carried one, and that calmly smoking tobacco has the same effect. Speaking to it politely at the end of the road, or leaving it food or a straw sandal, sends it away satisfied.

Is the okuri-inu dangerous or protective?

Both, and at the same time. While the okuri-inu walks behind you, nothing else in the mountains will approach, so the traveller is safer with it than without it. The *Honchō Shokkan* of 1697 says that a person who does not resist it and pleads for their life will be guarded from the other beasts of the mountain.

What is the difference between okuri-inu and okuri-ōkami?

They are the same creature under different animal names. Okuri-inu, the escorting dog, is the general term; okuri-ōkami, the escorting wolf, is the form told from the Kantō region through Kinki and in Kōchi. The Edo encyclopedias that record the behaviour file it under the wolf, and the word okuri-ōkami survives in modern Japanese as slang for a man who walks a woman home with bad intentions.

Is the okuri-inu based on a real animal?

The Japanese wolf is the animal behind the stories. The yōkai researcher Murakami Kenji has argued that the okuri-ōkami is simply the Japanese wolf, with its habit of shadowing intruders to the edge of its territory reinterpreted as supernatural escort. The wolf’s scientific name, *Canis lupus hodophilax*, means guardian of the way in Greek, which preserves the legend inside the taxonomy.