This is something I heard not too long ago.
I have no way of verifying it, but — just listen.
It's a story about a group of middle school students on a class trip, walking through Gion in small groups. No one knows exactly how many years ago. But the person who told me insisted it really happened.
Near the main gate of Kennin-ji, along a narrow stone-paved alley, a group of five or six students was making its way through the neighborhood. It was close to evening, and most of the tourists had already gone. The street was lined with old houses behind latticed wooden fronts, and the stones underfoot were faintly damp. One of the girls said afterward that she'd noticed a smell — incense, she thought, drifting from somewhere. Or maybe not incense. Something sweet and heavy and clinging, whatever it was.
That's when it happened.
A wooden sliding door on the side of the alley rattled open. Not because anyone touched it. It simply slid aside, quietly, on its own.
Beyond the door, deep in the dim earthen entryway, sat a Shigaraki-ware tanuki figurine. About waist-high on a child. Round-bellied, clutching a sake jug, wearing a grin. The ordinary kind. The kind you see everywhere.
The students let out a brief, bright sound — "Oh, a tanuki" — and that was all. They smiled at it for a moment and walked on.
But one of the girls stopped. Something made her glance back over her shoulder.
Every single one of her classmates had stopped moving.
The ones who had just walked away were standing perfectly still, every last one of them, all facing the tanuki. No voices. No movement. Just standing there in a row before the open door, staring at it in silence.
She called out: "What's wrong?" No one answered.
She tried again: "Hey." No one turned around.
Then the student at the front of the group slowly stepped down into the entryway and pressed a hand against the belly of the figurine.
The next student followed. Then the next. One by one they filed inside, wordless, eyes open, as though each was waiting patiently for a turn.
The girl panicked and ran.
She turned down one alley, then another, and kept running until she reached a street with people on it. She just ran.
She doesn't remember much of what came after. When she came back to herself, she was standing at Togetsukyo Bridge. Arashiyama. A distance from Gion that she couldn't account for. She was leaning against the bridge railing, staring at nothing, when a passerby noticed her and got help. That's what I was told.
She wasn't hurt. Her wallet and belongings were all there.
But there was something she told her teacher afterward.
While she was running, something had been repeating itself inside her head. She couldn't tell if it was her own voice or someone else's, but the same words kept cycling around and around, without stopping.
*I hate the tanuki. I want to kill the tanuki.*
She hadn't thought it herself, she said. She had no reason to think something like that. But she couldn't make it stop.
Her classmates were found a short while later, standing normally in the alley. Not one of them remembered touching the figurine. Not one of them remembered stepping inside.
Whose door that was.
Whether that tanuki is still somewhere in that alley today.
Nobody knows, apparently.
