Uncanny Japan - Japanese Folklore, Folktales, Myths and Language

This episode is story time. We’re traveling to the remote Oki Islands in the Sea of Japan for an old Japanese tale collected by Richard Gordon Smith in his 1908 book Ancient Tales and Folk-Lore of Japan. When young Tokoyo sets out to find her banished father, her journey leads her to an island haunted by a terrible tradition: every year, a young woman must be sacrificed to a...

In Japan, ghosts don’t wait for October.

Summer—especially the hot, humid weeks around Obon—has long been the season for ghost stories, strange encounters, and deliberately scaring yourself silly.

In this episode of Uncanny Japan, we’ll sit down for hyakumonogatari, the old practice of telling one hundred frightening stories while extinguishing candles one by on...

Every Obon, Japan’s ancestral spirits return home—guided by tiny fires and carried on cucumber horses. This year, for the first time, I’m responsible for preparing my father-in-law’s family altar. Join me for cauldron lids, lost ghosts, strange noises in an old house, eggplant cows, and the rituals used to welcome the dead home and send them safely away again.

On the final days of Obon, fishermen along Japan’s western coast once believed the sea belonged to the dead.

In this episode, I read Lafcadio Hearn’s eerie and beautiful essay “By the Japanese Sea.” Along the journey, we encounter drowned spirits rising from the waves, cats carried aboard fishing boats to ward off ghosts, delicate straw vessels made for lost souls, and...

A short Tanabata tale from the Uncanny Vault: Orihime the weaving princess, Hikoboshi the cowherd, and the river of stars that keeps them apart. On the seventh night of the seventh month, wishes are written on colorful strips of paper, tied to bamboo, and sent into the summer sky.

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