Honjo Nanafushigi

Honjo was the marshy east bank of the Sumida in Edo — canals, back lanes, cheap housing, the part of the city built on reclaimed swamp.

And it curated its own set of strange things. The Honjo Nanafushigi, the Seven Wonders of Honjo, which is Japan's first packaged mini-canon of urban legend.

There are nine of them. The name says seven; the record keeps nine, because different tellers kept different ones and nobody was going to drop a good one for the sake of arithmetic.

The roster

1. Oitekebori — the moat. You fish there, you do well, and as you leave a voice comes up out of the water: "Leave it behind... leave it behind..." Ignore it and things go badly. Leave your catch and you get home.

2. Okuri-chōchin — a lantern-light ahead of you on a dark road. You walk toward it. It stays exactly as far away as it was, forever, and you never reach it.

3. Okuri-hyōshigi — the night-watchman's wooden clappers, the ki blocks that were struck on patrol to mark the hours. You hear them following you. There is no watchman.

4. Akarinashi soba — a soba stall standing open with no lamp lit. Nobody tending it. Eating there — or in some tellings simply finding it dark — is an ill omen.

5. Ashiarai-yashiki — the mansion where an enormous filthy foot crashes through the ceiling every night demanding to be washed. Wash it and it withdraws. Refuse and it wrecks the house.

6. Kataha no ashi — reeds that grow leaves on one side only.

7. Ochiba-naki shii — a chinquapin tree that never drops a leaf.

8. Tanuki-bayashi — phantom drums and flutes, festival music from an empty direction.

9. Tsugaru no taiko — the fire-drum at the Tsugaru residence, heard beating when no drum is hanging.

It's the whole tradition in one neighbourhood

What makes this set worth reading together rather than one at a time is that it's a complete sampler of the Japanese supernatural, inside one district's walking distance.

There's a toll demanded by a voice (1). Two following-events (2, 3) — the thing that stays ahead of you and the thing that stays behind you. A commerce omen (4). A domestic obligation with a giant attached (5). Two phantom sounds (8, 9).

And then — my favourites — two entries in a category most people don't know exists: 6 and 7 are plants that are simply wrong.

Nothing happens at the one-sided reeds. Nothing happens at the tree that never sheds. There's no encounter, no danger, no rule, no escape. They just are like that, permanently, in a specific place, and the neighbourhood found it unsettling enough to file alongside a foot coming through a ceiling.

That's a genuine and under-appreciated category: things that merely are wrong, rather than things that do wrong. And Honjo has two.

Why it exists as a set

Because it's a set-list.

Rakugo storytellers — the professional solo comic narrators of Edo — loved this material and polished it. Nine short, punchy, geographically anchored strange tales, all within one district, is a night's programme. You can do them in any order. You can stretch or cut. The audience knows the addresses.

That's how the Seven Wonders format works everywhere it appears in Japan, and Honjo's is the famous one: not a folklore collection that someone assembled, but a performance repertoire that a neighbourhood happened to live inside.

You can still walk it. Most of the sites are identifiable in modern Sumida, which makes it the one entry here that's also an afternoon's itinerary.