Mayoiga

The Mayoiga legend records a Tono cycle of a fine house unexpectedly entered in the mountains. According to tale 63 of Yanagita Kunio's Tono Monogatari (1910), a village woman who went to the mountains to gather sansai came upon a fine house. Chickens played in the garden, food was set out on the tray, charcoal glowed in the brazier, but no one was there. Frightened, she returned home empty-handed. Later, a member of a kindred household entered the same mountain, took one bowl back and used it to measure rice by the river; the rice did not run out, the household prospered. Mayoiga gives gifts to those who find it, but if one acts greedily, the wealth fades. The structure has three parts: the boundary crossing of finding a house in the mountains; the choice of taboo (whether to take something or not); and the rise or fall of the household as the result of the gift. Three layers - mountain otherworld, gift and taboo - join in a classic yamabito legend, one of the older traditions collected by Sasaki Kizen in Tono. The figure locates the chance abundance of village life within folk belief, as a gift of the mountain. Comparable tales are widely recorded across Tohoku as 'yamauba's house' and 'house in the mountains.' The setting is the surrounding mountains of the Tono basin in Tono, Iwate, including Tsuchibuchi-cho, Kurihashi-cho and Miyamori-cho. No specific dwelling is identified, but the mountains around Sasaki Kizen's home village of Yamaguchi are the field of the cycle's emergence. The Tono City Museum and Denshoen and the Yanagita Kunio Memorial in Fukusaki, Hyogo, preserve relevant materials. Sources include the publication of Tale 63 in Yanagita Kunio's self-published Tono Monogatari (1910); further additions appear in Sasaki Kizen's Tono Monogatari Shui. Yanagita Kunio's Yama no Jinsei (1926), the folklore reports of the Tono City Board of Education and the surveys of the Iwate Prefectural Museum are key sources. The motif is reproduced in modern children's literature and animation.