People who suddenly disappear
Kamikakushi (“hidden by the gods”) is the folk belief that when children or young people go missing without warning, they have been carried off by gods, tengu or mountain spirits. Warnings that a “hiding god” will take children who play outside at dusk survive all over Japan and have long served as cautions for children.
“The Old Woman of Samuto” in The Legends of Tono
Yanagita Kunio’s The Legends of Tono includes the story of a young woman who disappeared, leaving her straw sandals under a pear tree, and returned more than thirty years later on a windy day as an old woman. Because of this story, the people of Tono were said to remark on windy days, “It’s the kind of day the old woman of Samuto might come back.”
The boy taken by tengu
In the late Edo period, a boy named Torakichi became famous for claiming that tengu had taken him to another world to train. The scholar Hirata Atsutane interviewed him and recorded his story in Senkyo Ibun (Strange Tidings from the Realm of Immortals). Real events such as accidents, children getting lost and running away from home are thought to lie behind kamikakushi, but people passed them down as mysteries that happen at the border with the otherworld. Modern stories such as Kisaragi Station carry on the same theme.
