This is a story I heard told as something from long, long ago. From the Kamakura period, apparently. Apparently — because there's no way to verify it. But perhaps it's precisely because it can't be verified that it has been passed down all this time.
There was a memorial service at Sensō-ji, they say.
An autumn night, after the rain had stopped. Some fifty monks had gathered in the temple grounds, chanting sutras. Candlelight trembled across the rain-soaked flagstones, incense smoke drifted low, and it was that kind of night — quiet, still.
The first sign, I'm told, was a smell. The smell of the river.
The Sumida is close. A river smell is nothing unusual. But that night it was different, somehow. Mud, and rotting grass, and something else — something animal, something raw — a smell that wasn't right, that drifted into the grounds without any wind to carry it.
The chanting began to falter.
Someone noticed. Something was coming from the direction of the river.
It was too dark to see clearly. But it was large. Larger than any ox. It had the shape of an ox, and yet it had come up out of the water. Dragging wet mud behind it, it moved slowly into the grounds. There was no sound of footsteps. Something that size, and not a single footfall — not one.
No cry, either.
It was simply there.
The monks tried to flee. But many of them found they could not move — not from fear, they said afterward, but because their bodies simply would not obey them. There were those who testified to exactly that.
Seven monks died that night. There in the grounds, where they stood. They fell and did not rise again. Of the remaining twenty-four, one after another fell ill in the days that followed, and some suffered for years.
From nothing more than seeing it.
It had not approached them. Had not touched them. Had done nothing to them. They had only looked upon it. That alone was enough.
The ox-demon is said to have vanished in the direction of Ushijima Shrine, near the temple — as though fleeing. That shrine still stands today, on the banks of the Sumida. Though fleeing seems like the wrong word, doesn't it? It feels more like returning. As though something that had always been there had simply come ashore for a little while.
There is one detail that has always caught in my mind.
Afterward, one of the monks who survived said this: when it came, he had closed his eyes. He was too frightened to look. That may be why he lived, he said.
But, the monk went on.
Even with his eyes closed, he had seen its face — there on the inside of his eyelids.
He never described what that face looked like. No matter how many times he was asked, he only shook his head, and said nothing.
There are people who say that even now, on certain nights — very still nights — the surface of the Sumida gleams with a strange, slick light. Others say it's only the moon reflected on the water. And yes, that's surely what it is. Most likely.
Only — if you happen to be walking along the riverbank, and you catch, just for a moment, that smell. Rotting grass and something animal, all mixed together.
On a night like that, I would suggest you make your way home a little earlier than usual.
