Inugami (犬神)

In the mountain hollows of western Japan, there is a possessing spirit still whispered about in secret. From the northeastern reaches of Shikoku to the deep interior of Kōchi, the mountain villages of Ōita, the coastal hamlets of Shimane — in lands where the fox's influence does not reach, a different lineage of spirits has taken hold. Those of the Kuma region in Miyazaki and Kumamoto call it "Ingame"; on Tanegashima, the tongue softens it to "Irigami." The names differ, but the abominable nature of the thing does not.

The cursed rite said to be its origin traces back to a form of sorcery already forbidden by the Heian period. A dog is driven mad with hunger, buried in the earth or chained to a post, food placed just beyond its reach until it is brought to the very threshold of starvation. In the moment of its death agony, its head is severed — and that head, it is said, flies through the air and at last tears into the food it was denied. The fury and desperate longing are enshrined, bones and all, and this is held to be the oldest form of the inugami.

Yet the inugami as it is actually described bears little resemblance to any dog. Its body is no larger than a somewhat oversized rat, its fur mottled and patchy, its tail forked at the tip, its eyes sunken and sightless as though crushed away. A blind beast, something like a mole's near kin, moving in a single file through the dark — there were those who claimed to have witnessed exactly this sight, and such accounts persisted well into recent times. In some regions it is said that seventy-five of them take up residence in a single household.

Those families branded as inugami-holders were shunned with a thoroughness that no degree of unusual prosperity could redeem. Marriage proposals were refused; they were driven to the outermost edges of the village. A person possessed was said to fall into violent fits of derangement, shrieking in a voice like a dog's howl. The inugami grants its master's desires while binding the master's house in turn — clinging across generations, never departing.

In the Hayami district of Ōita, there remain records of a shamaness who actually severed a dog's head, dried the maggots that bloomed from the rotting skull, and sold what she called "inugami" in exchange for coin. There were those who believed, and bought. In that place where sorcery and faith and terror bleed into one another, the inugami goes on lurking, quietly, still.