Strange Tales from Japan by Keisuke Nishimoto

Author:Keisuke Nishimoto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
Published: 2021-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

The Stone That Cried at Night

Long, long ago, in the ancient province of Totomi, in a place called Sayo, located in the middle of the mountains, there lived a young woman by the name of O-ishi.3 One day, O-ishi was requested by someone to go to a place called Kanaya and bring back a loan. As she approached the mountain pass on her return home, the day turned dark and she thought she had better hurry. Just as she was about to descend the mountain on the other side of the pass, a man appeared bearing an unsheathed sword.

“You there, lady!” he yelled brusquely. “Put down the money you’re carrying inside your robe!”

“Please leave me alone!” she pleaded, with her palms together in supplication. “This money belongs to someone else who is in terrible need of it!”

“Don’t make excuses to me!” the man continued. “Just hand it over.”

The man thereupon grabbed O-ishi and thrust his hand into the pocket of her robe.

O-ishi screamed for help, wrestled out of the man’s grasp and tried to run away. In an instant, the man brandished his sword and slashed O-ishi across the back. O-ishi groaned and fell, the man took the money from the breast pocket of her robe and quickly off down the mountain.

At the time, O-ishi was a full nine months pregnant. Clinging to a large stone next to her, she writhed in pain but was able to give birth to a baby boy. She had no strength, however, to pick up the crying baby and quickly passed away. The baby, too, having just been born, could not cry loudly enough to attract anyone’s attention.

At that moment, however, the stone that O-ishi had clung to, somehow felt the tragedy of the baby’s situation and cried out in a loud voice. The priest at the nearby Kuenji, a Buddhist temple, heard the cry and rushed to the scene. There, he was horrified to find a dead woman covered with blood, with a naked newborn baby at her side.

“This is terrible! Terrible!” he muttered.

The priest quickly picked up the baby and brought it back to the temple. He then called on a number of people to help carry O-ishi’s body back.

“You poor thing,” he thought. “Well, I’ll take care of your baby. Be at peace and go to the Buddha.”

Thus, the priest buried O-ishi in a simple grave and intoned a sutra for her sake.

The priest, however, was quite poor, and was reduced to making millet jelly candies and selling them in order to have enough money to bring up the child. He named the boy Otohachi.

Thanks to the priest, Otohachi grew rapidly and soon reached the age of thirteen.

Strange to tell, from the time O-ishi was murdered, when night drew near, the stone would cry aloud in a pitiful voice.

“It’s that stone that cries at night,” the people in the village murmured to one another. “There’s no doubt about it. It’s possessed by that murdered woman’s soul.”

To put her soul at peace,

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