Okuri-inu Legend

The okuri-inu (sending dog) tradition is a mountain-road tale of the night, in which a yamainu (the folk term for the Japanese wolf) follows behind a traveler at a steady distance. In Gifu, the tale is told of merchants and travelers along the mountain roads of Mino and Hida. The okuri-inu protects the traveler so long as he does not stumble or stop; in the moment of a fall or a halt, it pounces. If the traveler reaches home and casts a rice ball with the word "Gokuro-sama," the dog accepts the courtesy and departs. The Kiso Okuri-inu tradition shares the lineage, with the figure set as a boundary entity between mountain pass and village. The story has three stages: presence and footsteps behind on the night mountain road, the taboo against stumbling or turning, and the arrival at home with the courtesy of rice ball and "Gokuro-sama." The doubled taboo "do not fall, do not turn" and the manner of crossing the boundary by courtesy and feast carry the logic of the tale, joining the Kiso okuri-inu and Kanagawa Oyama okuri-inu in a shared yamainu-belief sphere. The central area is the mountain roads of the Hida region (Takayama, Gero, Gujo) of Gifu and around Shirakawa-go in the Mino region. Related tales spread to Kiso District in Nagano, Totsukawa Village in Nara, Wakayama, and Oyama in Kanagawa, in the range of the (now extinct) Japanese wolf. Yanagita Kunio's Yama no Jinsei, Tono Monogatari Shui, Yokai Dangi, the Gifu Prefectural Board of Education's Gifu Kenshi Minzoku-hen, and Hida and Mino ethnographies carry the figure.