Tsurube-otoshi

The sun leaves the Tanba hills the way a well bucket leaves the lip of a well, straight down and quickly, with the rope paying out behind it. Japanese has a proverb for exactly this, that the autumn sun falls like a tsurube, and somewhere in the villages south of Kyoto the logic ran the other way as well. If the light can come down like that, something else can.

The oldest village testimony was gathered in the Taishō period by two local researchers, Kakita Iouji and Tsuboi Tadahiko, whose collection of oral tradition from southern Tanba records what the farmers of Hōki, in the village of Sogabe, said about the great kaya tree there. Anyone walking beneath it after dark risked having the tsurube-oroshi come down out of the branches, burst into a flat rattling laugh, and put a question to them: had they finished the night’s work, and should it lower the bucket now, gii-gii, the two syllables imitating a pulley turning under load. Then it went back up. The whole encounter was over in seconds and cost the traveller nothing but the rest of his night.

The Tera section of the same village told it differently. There the thing lived in an old pine, and what came down was a severed head, and the head ate whoever it found. Afterwards it was gone for two or three days, which the villagers understood as a full stomach rather than mercy. Then it was back in the tree. Nobody treated this as a figure of speech.

Its appearance was never settled. The head is the commonest form, sometimes a man’s and sometimes an oni’s, hanging in the upper branches with the foliage closed around it, and the drop is the point rather than the face. Further east the creature dispenses with the head altogether. At Tsukumi in the old village of Kuze, in Gifu, the trouble came from one enormous tree standing in a spot that stayed dim even at midday, and what fell from it was a bucket. Around Hikone, on the eastern shore of Lake Biwa, the same thing sat in the branches, waited for a traveller to look up, and dropped the bucket at him. There is something almost domestic about it, the well tackle of an ordinary farmhouse relocated forty feet into the air and pointed at people.

The most elaborate version was told at Kuroe, in Kainan on the Wakayama coast, and set in the Genroku years. A great old pine stood by the road, and at its foot lay a bucket, and in the bucket something caught the light. A passer-by looking in would see the gleam of a koban and reach for the coin. The bucket took his arm, and the rope took the bucket, and both went up through the branches into the dark of the crown, where the tsurube-otoshi was waiting. Some who went up were only frightened. Some were eaten. The rest came back down all at once and did not get up.

Where the creature came from was answered, after a fashion, in the Edo kaidan collection Kokon Hyakumonogatari Hyōban, whose author Yamaoka Genrin knew the being as tsurube-oroshi and described it not as a head but as a ball of fire descending from a tree. He reasoned it out through the five phases. Rain is water, the tree is wood, and the thing that comes out of the tree is fire, so water feeds wood and wood feeds fire in proper order, which makes the apparition the spirit of the tree itself. A young tree cannot do it. Its ki has not yet filled the wood phase, so it never reaches the next one. Only a great old tree has enough life banked in it to give off flame, and because that flame is yin fire, it shows itself on wet nights.

Toriyama Sekien later drew Genrin’s hanging fire, and filed it under the name tsurubebi, the bucket fire. From the Shōwa period onward the two were sorted into separate creatures in the yōkai literature, tsurube-otoshi being the head or the bucket that falls and tsurubebi being the ghost light that dangles. Kenji Murakami has pointed out that this may be a tidy modern division of one older thing, a fire that hung in a tree the way a bucket hangs over a well.

The name itself barely travels. Murakami notes that it is only in the Tōkai and Kansai regions that the creature is called tsurube-otoshi at all, and only there that buckets come out of trees. Elsewhere the same dread exists without a name and usually without a bucket. At Yamanobe in Yamagata it is the nabe-oroshi, a cooking pot heated red that drops from a cedar, gathers up children who have played past sunset and carries them off in it. At Ashidani in Tsuwano, Shimane, torch-like fire falls on anyone who cuts wood near the sacred tree of Ōmotogami, and the fall does real injury. In the old village of Nakagawa in Shizuoka an earthenware roasting pan came down beside a large rock almost nightly. Aomori has the ijiko, read by some as fire dropping out of a treetop.

One town knows exactly what its own falling head was. Among the seven strange tales of the Sasayama castle town in Tanba-Sasayama is the kaya tree of the Tsuboi mansion, a gloomy old giant near the eastern gate under which a severed head was said to fall on night walkers. It was a performance. Someone had tied hair to a sake bottle and was hauling it up and letting it go.

What it can do is narrow and effective. It has height, it has patience, it has the cover of foliage that keeps a spot dark at noon, and it has speed, since nothing coming down a rope needs a plan. Where there is a bucket there is also a lure and a means of taking a man off the ground, and the laugh works on its own, since a voice in a tree at dusk asking whether your night’s work is done will empty a road for a season. What it cannot do is follow. It belongs to one tree, the kaya at Hōki, the ivy-choked pine at Tomimoto, the pine at Kuroe, and past the edge of that shade it has no reach at all. It keeps to nightfall and to rain. It feeds and then it is useless for days. And on at least one road in Tanba, the fix was to wait for morning and look up.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a tsurube-otoshi?

A tsurube-otoshi is a Japanese yōkai that hides in the crown of a large old tree and drops onto people passing below. Its name means “well-bucket drop”, after the way a bucket falls down a well shaft. It is usually described as a giant severed head, though in Gifu and Shiga it takes the form of a bucket lowered on a rope.

Where does the tsurube-otoshi come from?

The creature is recorded in Kyoto, Shiga, Gifu, Aichi and Wakayama prefectures, with the densest cluster of village accounts in southern Tanba, in what is now Kameoka and Nantan in Kyoto Prefecture. The name itself is used only in the Tōkai and Kansai regions. Similar creatures that drop from trees are known across Japan, but elsewhere they usually have no name and take the form of falling fire or red-hot cooking pots.

Does the tsurube-otoshi kill people?

It depends on the village. In the Hōki accounts it only drops, laughs, speaks and climbs back up the tree. In the Tera and Kuroe versions it devours the traveller, or hauls him into the treetop and lets him fall to his death.

What is the difference between tsurube-otoshi and tsurubebi?

In the Edo-period Kokon Hyakumonogatari Hyōban, Yamaoka Genrin described the being as a ball of fire that comes down from an old tree, and Toriyama Sekien drew that fire under the name tsurubebi. Modern yōkai literature separates the two, treating tsurube-otoshi as a falling head or bucket and tsurubebi as a ghost light that hangs from branches. Some folklorists argue they were originally one creature.

Why does the tsurube-otoshi live in a tree?

Yamaoka Genrin explained it as the spirit of the tree itself, reasoning through the five phases: rain is water, the tree is wood, and the fire that emerges is the tree’s own ki reaching its next phase. In that account a young tree cannot produce the apparition because it has not lived long enough. Only a great old tree can, and because the flame is yin fire, it appears on rainy nights.

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