Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Of all the shapes terror has ever taken in the world's folklore — wolves, hags, serpents, headless riders — the district of Kimotsuki in Kagoshima, at the far southern tip of Japan, is home to the most improbable: a bolt of cloth. One tan of plain white cotton — the standard trade measure, about ten meters long and the width of a kimono sleeve, the most ordinary object in the old Japanese economy, the stuff of every household's clothing — which rises on the dusk air of its own will and flies : rippling, snapping, luminous-pale against the darkening sky, hunting the lanes between the villages. It is called, with perfect literalness, the ittan-momen — "one bolt of cotton" — and its method is as direct as its name. It comes low and silent along the road behind a walker in the twilight, and then it strikes: whips itself around the face and throat, winds tight, and smothers — or, in other tellings, wraps its victim whole and soars away into the night sky, carrying them ...

Every culture has asked what happens to the soul of a house; Japan alone asked, with complete seriousness, what happens to the soul of a ladle . The answer is the tsukumogami : the "tool spirits"—household implements that, upon reaching one hundred years of age , receive a soul and awaken. The lore is precise about the mechanism and encyclopedic about the results: the umbrella becomes the one-legged, one-eyed kasa-obake , hopping on its wooden shaft with a long tongue lolling; the paper lantern splits into the fanged chōchin-obake ; the sandal, the koto, the tea-kettle, the mosquito net, the mirror, the futon, the temple gong—each, given its century, wakes as a small, mostly mischievous, occasionally vengeful spirit with the shape of its own former usefulness. The medieval picture-scrolls painted their great procession—the Night Parade of a Hundred Demons , in whose tumbling ranks the awakened tools march with the greater monsters—and the Tsukumogami-ki , the fourteenth-cent...