The Boy Who Brings the Rain

Yuki Tanabe
Field Correspondent, The Eastern Reaches

Fieldnotes — a mountain road outside Nagano, wet season

There is a particular kind of rain in the Japanese countryside that people used to say was not weather at all, but company. It comes in on a mountain road at dusk, soft and grey, and somewhere in it, the old accounts insist, walks a child. Small, silent, dressed in a mino, the straw cloak still worn by farmers here into living memory, and a kasa, the conical straw hat that keeps rain off the neck. He is called Amefurikozō, the rain-falling boy, and he is one of the gentler entries in the long catalogue of yōkai, though gentle is not quite the same as safe.

I first met him properly on paper rather than in any field, in the illustrated bestiaries of Edo-period Japan. Toriyama Sekien, the eighteenth-century artist whose catalogues did more than any other single source to fix the yōkai in the popular imagination, drew Amefurikozō as a stooped little figure carrying a paper lantern, his face left curiously blank, without the ordinary furniture of eyes or mouth. The accompanying note, as it is usually translated, ties him to the retinue of a rain deity, a kind of attendant sent ahead to announce or perhaps to cause the coming wet. Whether the folk stories existed first and Sekien simply gave them a face, or whether his print helped invent the creature as villagers came to know him, is a question the record will not settle. Yōkai scholarship lives with this problem constantly: page and oral tradition feeding each other until the seam disappears.

What the later tellings agree on is the mood of the thing rather than its origin. Amefurikozō is not a demon to be warded off with charm or salt. He is closer to a nuisance, or an omen, or simply a fact of weather given a shape a farmer could nod to on the road. Some tellings have him underfoot in paddies and ditches, tugging at ankles, more mischievous than menacing. Others place him at the edge of villages on the worst nights of the rainy season, a small wet shape glimpsed and gone, blamed, half seriously, for a flood that ruined a crop. He is frequently confused, in casual retelling and in the modern popular imagination, with karakasa-kozō, the one-eyed umbrella spirit with a single hopping leg, and I think this confusion is itself worth noting rather than correcting away. Both are yōkai built from ordinary rainy-day objects, the hat and the umbrella, animated by a folk habit of finding a small watching presence in every tool a household depended on. It is not hard to see how two such spirits, born from the same wet season and the same straw and paper, would drift together in memory until only careful readers keep them apart.

The deeper thread, the one I keep returning to, is what it meant to name the rain at all. In a farming world where a late storm could ruin rice or an early one save it, giving the weather a small stooping figure to walk alongside was not so much superstition as a way of keeping the unpredictable on speaking terms. You cannot reason with a low pressure system. You can, in the old telling, half expect a boy in a straw coat, and nod to him, and get on with the walk home. I have not found him myself on any road I have walked, though I have been rained on plenty, and have wondered, each time, whether that was only weather.

Yuki Tanabe is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Eastern Reaches. Shrines, foxes, and the folklore that survives inside cities rather than despite them — the abiding interest is how an old belief adapts to a commuter line, a vending machine, a lit street, and how rarely it simply dies.