Soraki-gaeshi

Also Known As: 空木返し, also written 空木倒し and read Sorakidaoshi; the same night sound is called Tengu-daoshi 天狗倒し, Tengu-no-kidaoshi and Tengu-nameshi elsewhere, and Furusoma 古杣 in Shikoku
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: It produces the complete sound of a great tree being cut down and falling, without any tree being cut or falling.
Role in Mythos: It is a mountain wonder made of noise alone, heard by woodcutters, hunters and villagers spending a night on a forested slope.
Relation to Humans: It frightens people who work the mountains and nobody in the recorded accounts is harmed by it, though the fright is real enough that men have abandoned a hut before dawn. Listeners learned to test it by ear rather than by going to look.

The axe starts a long way off, one stroke and then another, the flat knock of steel going into wet timber. It comes closer. A saw takes up its back and forth complaint somewhere above the hut, and then arrives the noise every woodcutter in Japan knows in his spine: the splitting crack, the rush of branches dragging other branches down with them, the long fall of something enormous. Then quiet. In the Tamura hills of Fukushima they worked out what was wrong with that quiet. The tree never landed.

Soraki-gaeshi was the name for it there, and over in Aizu, and far to the south in the Ōsumi hills of Kagoshima, and across the water in Ōita. Yanagita Kunio wrote the word into his running glossary of yokai names in the summer of 1938, and his entry runs to two sentences, because two sentences are all the thing requires. Sounds of felling. No felled tree. It is among the plainest items in Japanese folklore and among the least comfortable.

Aizu had a way of settling the question without leaving the fire. Timber brought down for real is not finished when it hits the ground. A hole has to be bored through the butt end so a rope can be passed through it and an ox can drag the log out, and that boring has a sound of its own, patient and grinding, quite unlike the axe. The soraki-gaeshi never got that far. It could do the chopping and it could do the fall, and it had nothing at all to say about the rope hole. People listened for the boring. Its absence was the proof.

There is nothing to describe beyond that. No shape, no height, no colour, no eyes in the dark between the trunks. Japanese folklorists file it among the yokai that consist purely of sound, which is a small category and an unusually convincing one, since a sound in a black forest is exactly the kind of evidence a frightened person cannot argue with. What the soraki-gaeshi has instead of a body is a repertoire, and the repertoire is precise: the ring of the blade, the wedge going in, the tearing at the hinge, the sigh of a crown coming through other crowns. Anyone who has felled a tree can hear that the performance is correct.

Who is doing the performing depends on which valley you ask in. Tengu are the usual answer, the mountain spirits whose business is to own the high forest and resent everyone in it. In parts of Yamanashi the same noise is credited to the mountain god, and in Tochigi men working the slopes would ask the mountain god to wake them at a particular hour and take the crash of the phantom tree as their alarm, which is a remarkably relaxed attitude toward being screamed at by a mountain. Foxes and tanuki take the blame elsewhere. In Ōita the soraki-gaeshi is said to be a tanuki kicking stones downhill with its hind feet to startle whoever is below, and on the Kunisaki peninsula the tanuki is described beating a tree trunk with its tail to fake the fall. Over on Shikoku the same night noise goes by the name furusoma, and there the explanation is sadder: the ghost of a woodcutter crushed under his own tree, still working. Some Kōchi accounts say a carpenter’s ink marker left behind on the mountain takes on a spirit of its own and does the cutting. A tool abandoned in the woods long enough apparently develops opinions about the job.

The moment that gives the tradition its shape is not a myth but an errand. Somebody walks up in the morning. The light comes down through the cedars in flat grey columns, the ground is cold, the needles are wet and packed and undisturbed, and there is no stump, no scatter of white chips, no torn hinge of pale wood, no smell of cut resin, which is the smell that ought to be hanging in the air for hours after a fall like that. Nothing has moved. Nobody has ever found the tree.

Its powers are the powers of a good liar with one accent it cannot manage. It can put an entire logging operation into your ear at any distance, move it closer, place it directly outside the wall you are sleeping against, and it is not tied to any particular spot, so there is no cursed grove to keep away from and no safe slope to prefer. The Aizu listeners were clear about that. It happens where it happens.

Its limits are just as strict. It can only ever be sound, and sound alone cannot touch anyone. It cannot complete the sequence, and the missing rope hole gives it away every time to anyone who knows the work. Where the blame falls on a fox or a tanuki the countermeasure is correspondingly unglamorous: in one district of Fukushima a burning stick thrown toward the noise was said to put a stop to it. Daylight ends it in any case. The folklorist Sakurai Tokutarō thought traditions of this kind grew out of the particular unease of walking a long way from other people, which explains the fear well enough without explaining the axe.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the soraki-gaeshi?

The soraki-gaeshi is a Japanese mountain yokai that consists entirely of sound. People in the forest hear an axe striking a large tree, then the crack and rush of the tree falling, but no tree has been cut and the spot is found undisturbed the next morning. It has no attested appearance because there is never anything there to see.

Where does the soraki-gaeshi come from?

The name is recorded in Fukushima Prefecture, in Tamura District and Aizu, and in the south at Momobiki in Kimotsuki District, Kagoshima, and in Ōita. Yanagita Kunio published the Fukushima usage in 1938. The same phenomenon is reported the length of Japan under other names, most commonly Tengu-daoshi and, in Shikoku, Furusoma.

How can you tell a soraki-gaeshi from real logging?

Listen for what comes after the fall. In Aizu it was said that real timber work includes boring a hole through the end of the log so a rope can be passed through it for the ox to drag it out, and the soraki-gaeshi never produces that sound. In Tamura the test was simpler still: the phantom tree is never heard hitting the ground.

What causes the soraki-gaeshi?

The usual culprit is a tengu, the mountain spirit blamed for most unexplained noise in the high forest. Some districts credit the mountain god instead, and others blame shapeshifting animals. In Ōita the soraki-gaeshi is explained as a tanuki kicking stones with its hind feet, while on the Kunisaki peninsula the tanuki is said to beat a tree trunk with its tail.

Is the soraki-gaeshi dangerous?

No one is recorded as being harmed by a soraki-gaeshi. It is a fright rather than a threat, and its only weapon is convincing noise in the dark. Where the sound was blamed on a fox or tanuki, one Fukushima district held that throwing a burning stick toward it would make it stop.