Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

The Amazon and its thousand tributaries are inhabited by an animal that seems designed by the river to unsettle its people: the boto , the great pink river dolphin— Inia geoffrensis —flesh-colored, long-beaked, warm-blooded, sociable, given to following canoes and surfacing beside bathers with an attention that feels, every river-dweller will tell you, personal . Around that uncanny attention the ribeirinho world built the most famous legend of the Brazilian waters. On festival nights—the June saints' feasts above all, when the riverside villages string lights and dance— the boto comes ashore as a man : tall, pale or red-tinted, charming beyond any local rival, dressed all in white, and always—the detail every telling guards like a jewel—wearing a hat, which he never removes , because beneath it his transformation is incomplete: the crown of his head still carries the blowhole . He is the finest dancer at the feast; he drinks, courts, and chooses the prettiest girl; he walks her t...

Japan's rivers and ponds are administered, in the old reckoning, by a creature that no other folklore quite managed to imagine: a being at once deadly and ridiculous, monstrous and punctilious, whose entire terrible strength depends on a saucer of water balanced on its own head . The kappa —"river child," one of the great tribe of yōkai that populate the Japanese uncanny—stands about the size of a child of six or eight; it is scaled or slimy, green or yellow, with webbed hands and feet, a turtle's shell on its back, a beaked, apish face, and, on the crown of its skull, a dish-shaped depression (the sara ) that must remain filled with water . While the dish is full, the kappa on land has the strength of many men—it wrestles horses into rivers, drags swimmers under, and defeats grown warriors. Spill the dish, and the creature is instantly helpless: paralyzed, dying, or reduced to abject pleading. And the classical method of spilling it is the most Japanese remedy in ...