Zashiki-warashi

Someone had scattered rice husks across the floor of the storehouse at the Murahyō house in Tōno, and in the morning there were footprints in them. Small ones. They wandered off between the sacks and doubled back and went nowhere in particular, the way a bored child’s feet go, and there was no child in that household with feet that size. Nobody swept them up. The family knew exactly whose they were, and while those prints kept appearing the Murahyō house did well.

The word breaks in two. Zashiki is the good matted room at the inner end of a Japanese house, the one with the alcove where guests are received. Warashi is a northeastern word for a child. Put together they name a being reported mostly from Iwate, with thinner scatterings across Aomori, Miyagi and Akita, that lives in the parlour or the storehouse of an old family and quietly decides how that family will do. Chapter seventeen of the Tōno Monogatari puts the arrangement in one clause: the house this god lodges in has wealth at its disposal.

They are seen as children of about twelve or thirteen, though accounts run from three to fifteen. The face is red. The hair is bobbed or cropped short. Boys wear dark cloth with the smudged kasuri pattern of country weaving, girls a red sleeveless chanchanko over a kosode, occasionally the swinging sleeves of a furisode. Plenty of witnesses could not say which sex they had seen. A few reports describe something else entirely, a black animal shape, or a small figure dressed as a warrior, which suggests the category was always looser than the tidy child of later illustration.

In the Sasaki house at Yamaguchi, the mother was sewing alone when she heard paper rustling in the next room. That room belonged to the master of the house, and the master of the house was in Tokyo. She slid the board door back on nothing at all, sat down again, and after a while heard someone in there sniffing steadily through their nose. She let it be. It had been said for a long time that the Sasaki house had one.

Mischief is the usual register. Footprints in ash or lime, the sound of a spinning wheel turning at night in a room with no wheel in it, drumming from the interior of the house like a kagura performance heard through walls, weight settling onto a guest’s bedding, pillows turned round while the sleeper is still on them. Arguing with it is pointless. Nobody in the stories is ever strong enough to make one stop.

The most famous account is a departure. At Yamaguchi there was an old family, Magozaemon’s, long said to keep two girl-deities. One day a man from the village walking home from town met two unfamiliar and very handsome girls near the bridge at Tomeba, coming towards him with something heavy on their minds. He asked where they had come from. From Magozaemon’s place in Yamaguchi, they said. And where were they going? They named a farmhouse in another village, a wealthy one, still prosperous today. So Magozaemon’s world is finished, the man thought, and it was. Not long afterwards a crop of strange mushrooms came up around a pear tree in the grounds. The last Magozaemon told them not to eat it. A servant argued that any mushroom is safe once you stir it in a bucket of water with a stalk of hemp, and the household agreed with the servant. Twenty-odd people, masters and servants together, died inside a single day. One seven-year-old girl survived because she had been outside playing and forgot to come home for lunch. Relatives near and distant arrived at the emptied house claiming old loans and old promises and carried away everything down to the miso, and the founding family of that village was gone by evening. The girl grew old, had no children and died of illness.

The ruin came with omens attached. Turning over cut fodder with a three-pronged hoe, the men found a great snake and killed it against the master’s orders, then found more snakes underneath than they could count and killed those too, half for the fun of it, and buried the basketloads in a mound outside the grounds. Magozaemon himself had been a scholar, unusual for the village and a little strange with it, ordering Chinese and Japanese books up from Kyoto, building an Inari shrine in his garden, travelling to Kyoto in person to purchase the highest court rank for his fox and then laying out one piece of fried tofu every day until the animal would let him take hold of its neck. The keeper of the village medicine hall enjoyed pointing out that his own buddha received nothing and delivered more.

Where these children come from is a question with several answers and one dreadful one. Sasaki Kizen, the Tōno storyteller whose material Yanagita Kunio wrote down, connected them to famine infanticide, called usugoro in the northeast because the child was crushed under a stone mortar, after which the body was customarily buried in the earthen-floored room or under the kitchen. The lesser grades of the spirit sit exactly where such a body would: the notabariko peering in and crawling on the dirt floor, the usutsuki-warashi working a mortar in the dark, while the white and most beautiful of them, the chōpirako, lives up in the good room. Yanagita preferred a gentler line, reading them as a country version of the gohō-dōji, the child-shaped guardians that priests summoned down. Orikuchi Shinobu saw a visitor from somewhere else, one of a family of outside spirits that come to labour for a house and wreck it by leaving, and noted that the zashiki-warashi never steps down into the garden. Kazuhiko Komatsu, looking at the whole pattern rather than the individual ghost, pointed out that these stories do a specific social job in a village where money visibly moves between families: they say where it went.

What it grants is prosperity, and the price is attention. Households feed theirs red-bean rice daily and watch to see whether it is eaten, because an untouched bowl is a warning. At Gonohe in Aomori a golden ball buried under the floor of a new house was said to call one in. Around Ninohe there are families who still keep a room made up with sweets and toys for a child who died or was never allowed to live, and worship it there. Colour carries the forecast. A white one means good things coming. A red one, red-faced in red clothes with a red hand-bucket, means it is leaving, and the Sawada household at Isagozawa saw precisely that bucket before its kitchen went, in the local phrase, left-front.

It cannot be kept and it cannot be caught. A wealthy family at Iide in Tsuchibuchi had a child of the house shoot at theirs with a bow, and it went, and they declined. Often only the young can see it: in July 1910, at the elementary school in Tsuchibuchi, a warashi appeared that every first-year pupil could see and no older child or adult could. Adults counting the children in a room sometimes come up one over and cannot say which one is spare. Some of this has survived into the tourist economy, at inns like the Ryokufūsō at Kindaichi Onsen, which burned down in 2009 and was rebuilt seven years later, though the being there is understood as an ancestor who died of illness rather than a warashi of the older kind. In all the Tōno material, nobody claims to have made one stay.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a zashiki-warashi?

A zashiki-warashi is a child-shaped household spirit from Japanese folklore, reported mainly in Iwate Prefecture and the wider Tōhoku region. It lives in the parlour or storehouse of an old family home and is treated as a god of fortune. Its name combines zashiki, the inner matted room, with warashi, a northeastern word for a child.

Is a zashiki-warashi good luck or bad luck?

Seeing a zashiki-warashi is considered good luck, and a household that has one is believed to prosper. The danger runs the other way: when a zashiki-warashi leaves a house, that family declines, sometimes catastrophically. In the Tōno Monogatari, the Magozaemon household of Yamaguchi lost its two girl-spirits and was wiped out by mushroom poisoning shortly afterwards.

What does a zashiki-warashi look like?

Zashiki-warashi appear as children of roughly three to fifteen years old, most often around twelve or thirteen, with red faces and bobbed or closely cropped hair. Boys are described in dark cloth with a kasuri pattern; girls wear a red sleeveless chanchanko, a kosode, or sometimes a long-sleeved furisode. Witnesses frequently cannot tell the sex of the one they saw.

What does a zashiki-warashi do?

A zashiki-warashi plays pranks rather than causing harm. It leaves small footprints in scattered ash or rice husks, makes the sound of a spinning wheel turning at night, drums like a kagura performance in an inner room, sits on guests’ bedding and flips their pillows over. Nobody in the stories manages to stop it.

Where does the zashiki-warashi belief come from?

There is no single answer. Sasaki Kizen linked the spirits to famine infanticide in the northeast, where children were killed and buried beneath the earthen floor or kitchen of the house. Yanagita Kunio read them instead as a rural form of the Buddhist gohō-dōji, child-shaped guardian spirits, while Orikuchi Shinobu treated them as visiting outside spirits who work for a household and ruin it by departing.

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