Yosuzume

Also Known As: 夜雀, “night sparrow”; also called tamoto-suzume, 袂雀, “sleeve sparrow”, in parts of Kōchi and Ehime
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: An unseen presence that chirps like a sparrow and keeps pace with a lone walker on a night mountain road, moving from behind him to in front of him and back.
Role in Mythos: It attaches itself to travellers after dark and, across most of Shikoku, arrives as the forerunner of the mountain dog and the wolf.
Relation to Humans: In Kōchi it is unlucky to have one fasten onto you, and villagers carried spoken charms to drive it off and walked with the hanging sleeve of the kimono held shut in a fist. In the Kumano country of Wakayama the same sound was read the opposite way, as proof that a wolf was walking with you and keeping the mountain’s worse things at a distance.

The ridge paths above Tanokuchi are narrow enough that two people cannot walk them abreast, and after dark the cedars close the sky down to a grey strip. The air off the slope is wet and several degrees colder than the village. Somewhere behind the walker, close enough to be level with his ear, something starts up. Chit. Chit. Chit. It is exactly the noise a sparrow makes, apart from the small matter that sparrows are asleep, and this one is matching his pace.

The people of the Hata District in Kōchi, on the Pacific side of Shikoku, called it the yosuzume, the night sparrow. The Kōchi folklorist Katsurai Kazuo collected the accounts and printed them in 1942 in the folklore journal Tabi to Densetsu, naming villages that have since been swallowed by mergers: Tanokuchi, now part of Kuroshio, and Tomiyama, absorbed into the Shimanto valley. Later collectors turned up the same creature across the island and over the water in Wakayama. It never became famous. It stayed a local road hazard, the kind of thing you were told about by someone who had walked home late.

What it does is simple and quietly awful. It takes station behind you, chirping. Then it is in front of you, chirping. Then behind again. It never lets you settle into a stride, and it never lets you place it. At Tanokuchi, to be fastened on by one was straightforwardly bad luck, and the reports do not soften that or explain it.

Ask what it looks like and the accounts come apart in your hands. In Tosa it is a small bird. Up in Kitagawa, in Aki District, it is not a bird at all but something like a black butterfly, and it does not keep its distance: it goes down the front of the kimono and up inside the umbrella, clattering “cha, cha” until the noise alone makes walking impossible. In Ehime it is a kind of moth. At Kubokawa nobody claims to have seen anything, and the creature is only a sound, described as a bell being rolled along the road at your back. No one ever caught one and produced it. These are not four descriptions of one animal. They are four answers to the same question, which is what to call the thing that follows you in the dark when you can hear it perfectly well and cannot see it at all.

The second name is the more unnerving of the two. In Higashitsuno and Kubokawa in Takaoka District, and at Jōhen on the Ehime coast, it is the tamoto-suzume, the sleeve sparrow, and it goes for the long hanging sleeve of the kimono. For one to drop into your sleeve was the outcome you walked home hoping to avoid. So people crossed those stretches in daylight where they could, or in company, and where neither was possible they walked with the cloth of the sleeve bunched shut in one fist the whole way. There is something very believable about that detail, a whole belief system reduced to a grip on your own clothing.

On the Tsunoyama road there is a stranger wrinkle. Two men walk together, and the chirping runs alongside them the whole way, and only one of them can hear it. The other hears wind and gravel and his friend behind him going quiet.

Everywhere on Shikoku the bird is a herald rather than the main event. It comes ahead of the yamainu, the mountain dog, and ahead of the wolf. In Ehime the moths were said to arrive so thickly before the dogs appeared that a man could not push forward along the path. Read that way, the yosuzume is not a monster but an alarm, and the sensible response to an alarm is to stop walking.

Then there is Wakayama, where the whole thing turns over. At Hongū in Higashimuro District, now part of Tanabe, deep in the Kumano mountains, the invisible chirping follows travellers exactly as it does in Kōchi. Same sound, same darkness, opposite meaning. There, for the night sparrow to be with you was proof that a wolf had taken up escort and was keeping the mountain’s evils off your back. Two prefectures apart, the same small noise in the same black trees was either the worst thing that could happen to a man on the road or the best.

Nobody recorded where the yosuzume came from. It has no birth, no parents, no first appearance, no story in which a person becomes one. It belongs to a broader family of escorting beings rather than to any myth cycle, alongside the okuri-suzume of Nara and Wakayama, which does the same work under a slightly different name. Its whole existence fits inside the twenty minutes it takes to get over a ridge and down to the lights.

Against that, people had charms, and the charms are worth hearing. In Tomiyama the words were “Bird that cries chit, chit, chit, do you long for the shinagi rod? If you long for it, then take one blow,” or else “Bird that cries chit, chit, chit, blow it away swiftly, divine wind of Ise.” On the Tsunoyama pass the formula ran longer, addressing the great shiraga and the small shiraga, warning them that no one but a child of the gods passes over the ridge, promising to set sakaki up behind, and finishing with abira-un-ken-sowaka, the mantra of Dainichi Nyorai. Three branches were stood up on the path. If it was done properly the sleeve sparrow did not follow, and neither the wolves nor the mountain dogs appeared.

What powers it has all run in one direction. It cannot be outwalked, it cannot be located, it takes your rhythm away, and it can choose whose ears it enters. It knows what is coming down the slope before you do. The later compendia add a penalty for handling one, which is that anyone who catches a night sparrow carelessly is left with night blindness, an affliction that suits the creature exactly.

Its limits are equally plain, and they are the reason nobody in Kōchi seems to have been terrified of it so much as wearied by it. At Kitagawa, all you have to do is settle your ki, and the black butterfly in your umbrella simply stops being there. The spoken charms turn it. Daylight ends it. Company usually ends it. A closed fist on your own sleeve is enough. For all the racket, the night sparrow can be beaten by a man who refuses to be hurried, which may be why the mountains of Shikoku kept it and never bothered to make it a legend.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Yosuzume?

The Yosuzume, or “night sparrow”, is a bird yōkai of Japanese folklore that follows people walking mountain paths after dark, chirping “chit, chit, chit” close to the ear. It moves from behind the traveller to in front of him and back again, and it is usually heard rather than seen. Traditions for it were recorded in Kōchi and Ehime on Shikoku and in the Kumano mountains of Wakayama.

What does the Yosuzume look like?

Sources disagree completely. In Tosa it is described as a small sparrow-like bird, in Kitagawa as a black butterfly that gets inside the breast of a kimono and under an umbrella, in Ehime as a kind of moth, and at Kubokawa as nothing visible at all, only a sound like a small bell rolling along the road behind the walker.

Is the Yosuzume dangerous?

It depends entirely on where the story is told. In Kōchi, having a Yosuzume fasten onto you was unlucky, and in Ehime and Kōchi it was treated as a warning that mountain dogs or wolves were about to appear. In Wakayama the meaning was reversed, and the chirping was taken as proof that a wolf was escorting the traveller and protecting him from the evils of the mountain.

How do you get rid of a Yosuzume?

Villagers used spoken charms, one of which asks the chirping bird whether it longs for the shinagi rod and offers it a single blow, while another calls on the divine wind of Ise to blow the bird away. On the Tsunoyama pass a longer formula ending in the Buddhist mantra abira-un-ken-sowaka was recited and three branches were stood up on the path. In Kitagawa it was said that simply calming yourself made the creature vanish.

What is the tamoto-suzume?

Tamoto-suzume, the “sleeve sparrow”, is the name the same creature carries in Higashitsuno, Kubokawa and Jōhen, where it is said to go for the long hanging sleeve of the kimono. Having one drop into the sleeve was considered unlucky, so travellers crossed those stretches by day or in company, and otherwise walked holding the sleeve shut in one hand.