Furusoma

Deep in the mountain forest at night, you hear an axe.

Steady, unhurried, the sound of a big tree being taken down properly by someone who knows how. It goes on. Then the pause. Then the long tearing crack, the rush of the fall, and the impact — you feel it come up through the ground.

In the morning every tree is standing. Nothing has been cut.

Across most of Japan that experience gets blamed on the tengu, or the mountain god, or a tanuki, or on nothing at all. Shikoku gave it a name and a biography, and that choice is what makes this entry worth reading.

The old woodsman

The furusoma — "the old woodcutter" — is the ghost of a lumberjack who was crushed to death by a tree he was felling.

And in the fuller telling, he was cutting illegally. Taking timber that wasn't his to take, off a mountain that wasn't his, and the tree came down on him.

So the sound you hear at night is him, still working. The axe strokes, the fall, the impact — the last thing he ever did, repeating in the dark, forever, on a mountain where nothing gets cut.

It's densest in Kōchi and Tokushima.

He visits

The furusoma does something the pure phenomenon doesn't do, and it's the detail that gives me a chill.

The huts where working woodcutters sleep shake in the night. Not the forest generally — the huts. The tools swing on their pegs, the frame moves, the men inside wake up.

Everywhere else in Japan the phantom tree-fall is weather: it happens to the forest, impersonally, and you happen to be there. On Shikoku it comes to where the loggers are sleeping and rattles the building.

He isn't just performing the work. He's calling on the workforce.

Why this one is unusual

There's a whole family of Japanese yokai that are events rather than beings — things that happen instead of appearing. Beans scattering in a ceiling. A house shaking. Trees falling that never fell. The sound of laundry being beaten by a river where nobody is.

They almost never have culprits. That's rather the point of them: something happened, nobody knows what, and the tradition mostly leaves it open.

Shikoku closed it — and look at who they picked. Not a demon, not a god, not a trickster animal.

A colleague.

The sound of the trade, explained as the trade's own casualty, still on shift.

And the illegal-cutting clause is the fine print that makes it moral rather than merely sad. Japanese mountain belief has real rules about what may be taken and when, with days on which the mountain must not be entered at all. He broke them, and the mountain kept him — and now he demonstrates, nightly, to the men who are still working, exactly what the job costs.