The Ushi no Koku Mairi (丑の刻参り)

Past two in the morning, in the dead hour known as ushi-mitsudoki. The hour when grass and insects alike hold their breath — the ancients called it "the gap that opens onto the eternal realm." At the same hour that shares its name with the demon gate, the direction of ushi-tora, the darkness peels back its thin skin, and it is said that the voice of deep hatred carries more easily through.

A woman robed in white walks the shrine's approach. Upon her head she wears an iron ring — a trivet, inverted — with three candles burning from its prongs. A mirror hangs against her chest, a comb is clenched between her teeth, and the only sound that cleaves the night air is the single-toothed geta striking the stone path. Is the white powder on her face meant to erase the flesh of the living — or is it proof that she has begun to become something else?

She presses a straw effigy, fashioned in the likeness of the one she despises, against the sacred tree, and drives a five-inch nail through it. Wherever the nail enters the figure, they say, the target begins to sicken in that same place. Performed across seven consecutive nights, the curse reaches its fulfillment, and the target is said to perish. Yet should anyone witness the rite, its power vanishes at once — and so the one performing it grows acutely, almost animal, in her sensitivity to the presence of others.

Kifune Shrine in Kyoto is a name still spoken in the same breath as this curse. It was once a place of pure tradition — a belief that visiting on the ox year, the ox month, the ox day, and the ox hour would bring one's deepest wish to fruition. Then the grudge of Hashihime, the Bridge Princess, seeped into that ground, and a holy site of prayer was transformed into a stage for malediction. Whether one is beseeching a god or bargaining with a demon — that boundary, perhaps, is drawn by the color of the petitioner's own heart.

On the night the seventh vigil ends, a black ox is said to lie somewhere along the shrine path. To step over it is to complete the curse — yet the moment one flinches at the sight of the beast, everything dissolves into nothing. Hatred, it seems, takes the shape of an unshakeable will, and nothing more.

Even now, at the roots of sacred trees in old shrines, one sometimes finds the traces of rusted nails, or a bundle of straw gone half to rot. How many nights in they represent, whether the seven were ever completed — no one tries to find out.