SCS 66

Story 66

A Story of Being Tricked by a Tanuki

I was only eight years old at the time.

Both of my parents worked, so it had been a long-standing tradition since preschool that I would spend summer vacations at my grandmother’s house in the middle of nowhere. Naturally, that summer at age eight, I was once again sent to my grandmother’s rural home.

It was such a remote place that there were almost no other children around, and even back then, the word “depopulation” fit the area perfectly.

One day, I was playing alone in a bamboo grove. I had grown tired of catching bugs and felt like exploring the grove instead. The bamboo grove was surprisingly cool, even in the summer.

Sweating heavily, I decided to rest by sitting with a bamboo stalk as my backrest. I took a sip from the tea my grandmother had packed in my water bottle and relaxed for a moment. After about five minutes, I heard the crisp sound of footsteps crunching leaves nearby. Looking in the direction of the sound, I saw my grandmother beckoning me.

She had come to pick me up.

Thinking it was already time to go home, I stood up and hurried toward her.

But my grandmother walked on without waiting for me.

In the blink of an eye, she disappeared from sight. But then, she reappeared again.

I followed her.

However, no matter how far I went, it was still just bamboo all around.

“Grandma, are we there yet? Are we almost there?” I called out loudly.
“Not yet, not yet,” she replied.

We repeated this conversation many times.

Eventually, I got tired and sleepy, so I plopped down and started whining. Then, my grandmother gave me a piggyback ride.

Soon after, I fell fast asleep.

At that time, my family had apparently launched a huge search for me. It seems I had run off from my grandmother’s house.

I ended up being missing from her house for a full two days. A missing person report was filed, and everyone in my grandmother’s village searched frantically for me.

In the end, I was found collapsed in a town about five kilometers from my grandmother’s house.

After that, I spent a week bedridden with a high fever. During that time, I recounted the events in the bamboo grove.

I told them how my grandmother had packed the water bottle, how she came to pick me up and we walked together in the grove, how she gave me a piggyback ride when I got tired, and how I eventually fell asleep.

As it turned out, my grandmother had never given me a water bottle, never came into the bamboo grove to get me—she had even searched for me immediately after I ran off and couldn’t find me at all.

So who had that been?

Also, the fact that I was missing for two days doesn’t make much sense. From my own experience, not even a full day had passed. Yet somehow, it was recorded as two days.

My grandmother said,
“You must have been tricked by a tanuki.”

This region has a lot of tanuki, and apparently, people are often fooled by them.

I had become one of those people tricked by a tanuki.

That was about forty years ago.