Konaki-jiji

A baby is crying, alone, in the mountains.

You go to it. Of course you do.

You pick it up — and the face looking back at you is an old man's.

And then it starts to get heavy. Not gradually. It grows heavier and heavier until it is beyond bearing, and it crushes you.

The trap, with everything else stripped out

This is the fourth time in this collection that a phantom baby gets impossibly heavy, and comparing them is the whole point of the entry.

The ubume is a woman who died in childbirth. She hands you her baby at a river crossing and asks you to hold it, and the weight grows — but if you endure it, the encounter resolves, she is released, and you're rewarded with strength. Grief, asking for help.

The wet woman on the coast hands over a heavy baby as bait, to pin you while something comes out of the water. Grief's machinery, running as a trap for somebody else's benefit.

And the konaki-jiji is that same machinery with both the grief and the partner removed.

Nobody is mourning. Nobody else is coming. There is no story about who this was or what happened to it. There's just a cry in the wilderness, engineered to exploit the one reflex a person cannot suppress, and then a weight.

It is compassion, weaponised, with nothing behind it.

It may have been somebody's nickname

Now the provenance, which is one of the strangest in the collection.

The name traces to Tokushima, on Shikoku — and, remarkably, to family records in which it was used to describe a real old man who sounded like a child when he cried.

An actual person, in an actual village, with an unfortunate voice, and a nickname that outlived him by a very long way.

If that holds, the sequence runs: a man's nickname → a local folklore scrap → a national monster.

And then it got famous

Because that scrap was thin. Yanagita's school recorded it as minor regional lore and there it might have stayed forever.

Then Mizuki put it in *GeGeGe no Kitarō*, and the konaki-jiji became one of the most widely recognised yokai in Japan — a recurring character, on merchandise, known to every child in the country.

And Yamashiro, in Tokushima, now runs a yokai-village tourism identity with a konaki-jiji statue.

So the full arc, with dates and receipts: a man's nickname → a folklore scrap → a manga character → a national mascot → a local economy.

That's the same road the flying cotton cloth walked, and the sand-throwing old woman, and the wall that blocks the night road. The famous yokai of modern Japan are, to a startling degree, whichever thin regional scraps one manga artist happened to like — and the towns they came from have, entirely reasonably, built gift shops.