Iya Konaki-jiji Legend

The Iya Konaki-jiji tradition is a mountain-entity tale set in the Iya Valley of Awa Province in Tokushima, about a being that cries like a baby at night. On mountain paths and passes a baby's wail draws the traveler to pick up the bundle; once held, it changes into an aged form and grows steadily heavier, so that the person cannot put it down and at last collapses and dies. The steep gorges of the Nishi-Iya and Higashi-Iya valleys, an area heavy with Heike refugee tradition, preserve related tales; some accounts treat the entity as an expression of the laments of Heike refugees who fled to Iya after the Genpei War. The typical scene has three stages: a baby's cry on a night path, the change of form and sudden gain in weight, and the gradual exhaustion of the holder. Some commentators read the figure as the anthropomorphization of mountain bird cries; others link it with Heike requiem belief. Yanagita Kunio's Yokai Dangi (1956), Miyamoto Tsuneichi's Shikoku folklore surveys, and the Shikoku Folklore Society set the textual ground; Mizuki Shigeru's GeGeGe no Kitaro and yokai dictionaries gave the figure modern fame.