Ittanmomen (一反木綿)

This apparition was born from the dusk of Kimotsuki District, Kagoshima Prefecture. A white, ribbon-like something — roughly the length and breadth of one tan of cotton cloth — swims through the air without a sound, moving always toward the living. Locals have long whispered of it as "ittanmonme," and that name alone was enough to send children's feet hurrying home.

Its manner of attack is quiet, and for that reason all the more terrifying. It winds itself around the throat, or smothers the face, stealing the narrow space between one breath and the next. It is said to spiral at great speed as it closes in, and that its quarry sometimes vanishes with it into the night sky. One man slashed through the cloth with a short sword; all that remained in his palm was half-dried blood.

In the land of Kimotsuki there is a shrine where this creature is said to prefer to appear. Children who stood before its torii gate would bolt instinctively — for they believed it hunted whoever fell to the back of the group. Everyone had to be first. That fear was what made their legs run faster.

In the illustrated scrolls of the Hyakki Yagyō, a cloth-like being with limbs is depicted among the night parade of a hundred demons, and the folklorist Kazuhiko Komatsu regards it as a distant ancestor of the ittanmomen. Cotton funeral banners used at burials, torn away by the wind and drifting across the fields at dusk — the memory of a death-cloth flying through the sky may have seeped outward from exactly such a sight.

The rumors have never ceased. A white shadow running alongside a bullet train. A thirty-meter cloth-shaped object floating above the Rokkō Mountains. Something that a woman walking her dog in a Tokyo residential neighborhood found herself chasing. An actor who testified to seeing a long white cloth in the sky above a film studio. Far from the land where the legend was born, things resembling the ittanmomen continue to be sighted — or perhaps the cloth never cared about place to begin with.