What Is the Zashiki-warashi? The House Child of Tono and Its First Tales

A girl comes home from her girls' school for the holidays, walks down a corridor in her family's old house, and meets a child she does not know. It is a boy. She is badly startled, and the book reports it without comment. That scene sits in a short book published in 1910, and it is where many readers begin with the Zashiki-warashi. The figure it records is not a ghost that haunts and not a monster that hunts. It is a child-like presence tied to a household's luck, reported above all in Iwate Prefecture. This scroll reads the first tales closely and separates what they say from what later writers added.

Where the first record comes from

The earliest record we could open is Tono Monogatari by Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962), first published on 14 June 1910. It collects tales of the Tono basin in Iwate. The Tono Tourism Association says many of them came to Yanagita from Sasaki Kizen, a Tono native, and describes the book as non-fiction gathered from local legends and old sayings. Yanagita was a folklorist collecting from a teller, so read the book as a collector's record, not as a sworn statement.

The book is in the public domain in Japan, and we read it in the Aozora Bunko edition. Its index lists the Zashiki-warashi under tales 17 and 18. Wikipedia also cites tale 87 of the later supplement, Tono Monogatari Shui, which we did not open.

What tales 17 and 18 say

Tale 17 opens with a general statement. Many old houses are said to have a deity called the Zashiki-warashi, most often a child of about twelve or thirteen, who sometimes shows itself. Two examples follow. In the house of a man named Imabuchi, the girl home from school meets it in a corridor, and it is a boy. In a family called Sasaki, a mother sewing alone hears paper rustle in the next room while the master is away, finds nothing, and later hears snorting. The family has long been said to have one. The tale ends with the point that matters most: a house where it lodges is said to be prosperous and at ease.

Tale 18 says it may also be a girl. The house of Yamaguchi Magozaemon had long been said to hold two girl deities. One day a man returning from town meets two unfamiliar, good-looking girls who look troubled. They say they come from Magozaemon's house and are bound for another family's, which still prospers. The man concludes that the old house is finished. Not long after, the whole household of over twenty, masters and servants, dies in one day after eating poisonous mushrooms. A seven-year-old girl survives, and she dies years later without children.

The man in the tale draws the conclusion himself: if they are leaving, the line is ending. The text gives the departure first and the disaster after.

Names and variants

The figure goes by different names. The table separates what we saw from what we only read about.

Wikipedia traces some of these regional names to an older travel miscellany, the Jippoan Yureki Zakki, which we did not open. So 1910 is the earliest record we read, not necessarily the earliest one that exists.

A child in Miyazawa's pages

In 1926 the Iwate writer Miyazawa Kenji published a short piece called "Zashiki-bokko no Hanashi" in the magazine Getsuyo. We read it in the Aozora Bunko edition. It is literature, built from several small scenes. In one, ten children join hands and circle a room, and somehow they become eleven. A grown-up says the extra one is the spirit, but nobody can tell which, and each child sits up straight, sure that it is not himself. In another, a ferryman recounts that a boy in formal dress crossed the river at night and said he was leaving one house for another. The first house later declined, and the second prospered. Miyazawa introduces them as tales from "our" region and does not call them records. They are stories shaped by the belief, and they show it living in Iwate storytelling by 1926.

What later writers made of it

Interpretations came after the tales. Wikipedia reports that Yanagita saw in it a version of a divine child who protects the home, and that the folklorist Orikuchi Shinobu grouped it with faithful spirits that come from elsewhere to serve one family. It also reports that Komatsu Kazuhiko compared it to animal-spirit keeping such as izuna-tsukai, a belief used to explain why families' fortunes rise and fall. The same article says it works much like keeping a fox spirit, a theme found in Kitsune lore.

A darker reading ties the figure to children lost before birth or killed in infancy. A scholarly abstract by Linda Kinsey Spetter in Children's Folklore Review (2012) names earlier authors who made that link. Wikipedia attributes a similar remark to Sasaki Kizen. Tales 17 and 18 say nothing of it. It is a reading by later writers, and it is painful ground, so handle it with care.

Common mistakes and mix-ups

"It is a ghost." The Iwate tourism page says it is a divine spirit, not a ghost. Tale 17 calls it a deity.

"You have to see it to be lucky." A tourism page says people who meet it will advance. The tales tie luck to its living in the house, whether or not anyone sees it.

"It exists only in the Tono tales." Wikipedia says reports come mostly from Iwate but also from Aomori, Miyagi and Akita, and lists similar figures elsewhere in Japan. The book is a collection, not an origin.

"Every one is the same." Wikipedia describes the Kindaichi inn's spirit as an ancestor who died of illness and became a protector, unlike the usual house child. Compare the masked visitors of Namahage in Akita, a different Tohoku tradition altogether.

Reading a sighting story

Ask five questions of any account:

• Who is speaking: the family, a neighbor, a collector or a hotel?
• Does the story say what the child did, or only that someone felt it?
• Does it tie the child to the family's fortune, as tales 17 and 18 do?
• Is the spirit a boy or a girl, and does the name come from Tono or another region?
• Is the text a record, a tale, or a modern retelling?

Where it stands today

Tourism pages show the belief alive as a hope. The Iwate tourism guide says people still claim to have seen the spirit at the Ryokufuso inn in Kindaichi Onsen, in Ninohe. The inn burned in 2009, and the Ninohe tourism page announced a reopening for May 2016, with its "Enju" room reproduced. We did not confirm that it reopened. Tono's tourism sites describe it as a spirit that brings wealth. Beyond the tourism pages, we found no survey of how many families still hold the belief, so that part is unverified. Like the Kappa, the figure now also appears widely in modern media. This scroll does not follow those uses.