The Child Spirit That Brings a House Fortune
The zashiki-warashi is a household spirit of old farmhouses in northeastern Japan, above all in Iwate. It takes the shape of a child of five or six with bobbed hair and a faintly red face, sometimes a girl, sometimes a boy. It rarely shows itself: at night it patters across the empty zashiki parlor, flips sleepers' pillows, or joins children at play, and as a rule only children or the fated can see it.
The most famous record is items 17 and 18 of Yanagita Kunio's Tono Monogatari (1910). A villager met two unfamiliar girls on the road who said they had come from the old Yamaguchi Magozaemon house and were moving to another family in the next village; soon afterward more than twenty members of the Magozaemon household died in a single day of mushroom poisoning, leaving only a seven-year-old girl. The rise and ruin of a house following the spirit's arrival and departure is the constant skeleton of these tales, and Sasaki Kizen's 1920 collection on the zashiki-warashi of Oshu gathered many more. Folklorists generally read the figure as a faded form of an old household-god cult.
Today the spirit is an emblem of Iwate. The inn Ryokufuso at Kindaichi Onsen in Ninohe is famous for the child spirit Kamemaro of its Enju room, said to bring luck to guests who glimpse it, with reservations booked years ahead; the inn burned down in 2009 and the legend carried on after its 2016 rebuilding.
