The Places

Osorezan (Aomori) — the mountain of dread: the sulfur waste read as Sai no Kawara, the children's stone piles and pinwheels, Jizō's riverbank made landscape, the itako mediums at the twice-yearly festivals. The underworld's front entrance.

Tōno (Iwate) — the founding fieldwork's home: kappa pools (red-faced locals), zashiki-warashi households — and at Kindaichi Onsen, the inn where the house-child still takes bookings.

Tokyo — Masakado's kubizuka in Ōtemachi: a 10th-century flying head's grave maintained on the financial district's costliest ground, desks angled out of respect. Sugamo holds Oiwa's grave, still visited by film productions asking permission.

Nasu (Tochigi) — the Sesshō-seki: the nine-tailed fox's Killing Stone, which split in 2022 and received a formal appeasement ceremony that March — goryō practice, current year.

Kyoto — the densest cluster: Rashōmon's curbside marker; Ichijō Modoribashi (the bridge of Ibaraki's arm and Seimei's hidden shikigami); Seimei shrine's pentagrams; Kifune (where the rejected pray — Hashihime's oracle, Iwanaga's matchmaking); Toribeyama's grave-slopes (kazenbō); Mibu-dera (sōgenbi); Tō-ji standing over the vanished Sai-ji (kyōrinrin); and the Daimonji fires each August (Obon).

Uji — Hashihime's shrine at the bridge; Ōtsu/Lake Biwa — Mii-dera vs Hiei (the rat shrine and cat shrine facing each other across the valley), Seta's bridge (ōmukade); Nara — Gangō-ji and its demon tradition.

Himeji — one castle, bracketed: Okiku's well at its base, Osakabehime's shrine in its keep.

Izumo (Shimane) — Hearn's fox country (kitsune): the shrine fox-holes; and at Izumo Taisha, the shimenawa at its grandest. Nearby, Yomotsu Hirasaka — the claimed boulder-sealed pass of Yomi.

Okayama — Kibitsu shrine's kettle-oracle: the slain oni Ura prophesying in steam, bookable today.

Shikoku — Yashima-ji's tanuki shrine (temple 84 of the pilgrimage), Matsuyama's sealed 808 tanuki, Kōchi's yokai valleys.

Shimonoseki — Akama shrine: Antoku's shrine, Hōichi's hall, the heikegani in the straits below. The Heike grief-world's capital.

Kyushu south — Jōren Falls's spider-mistress (Izu, but of the type); Kagoshima's ittan-momen shrine-runs; Kumamoto's Amakusa passes (abura-sumashi).

A few more addresses, added 2026-07-30. Miwa (Nara) — Ōmiwa Shrine, which has no main hall, because the mountain itself is the god: the oldest surviving form of Japanese religion, still operating. Its cedar hangs over every brewery door in the country as the sugidama. Shinsen-en (Kyoto) — the palace garden pond where Kūkai summoned Zennyo Ryūō to break the drought of 824; the imperial garden is gone, the dynasty is gone, the pond still holds water. Sayo-no-Nakayama (Shizuoka) — the pass of the night-crying stone, where a murdered pregnant traveller's grief was given to geology; Hiroshige drew the stretch, stone included. Kōzenji and Mitsuke Tenjin (Nagano/Shizuoka) — the two temples 150 km apart that share one dog under two names, and between which 600 volumes of scripture travelled in 1793 — a gift which, scholarship proposes, may have prompted the legend itself. Iinoyama (Kagawa) — "Sanuki Fuji," whose summit allegedly carries the footprint of a hand-washing giant who straddled the bay now spanned by the Great Seto Bridge.

The point: no other country maintains its monsters' real estate like this — graves tended, wells preserved, shrines staffed, ceremonies current. This bestiary has an atlas because the country kept the addresses.