Tsukumogami

The story

They say that in Japan a thing comes to life when it turns a hundred years old.

A paper umbrella. A lantern. A pair of straw sandals. It sits in a corner of the house for so long that people almost forget it is there. And one day, without warning, a mouth, an eye, a foot: and there you have a tsukumogami.

But things don't usually make it to a hundred. Someone throws them away first.

It was the last day of the year, in a big house in the city. The doors were flung open, dust was flying through the rooms, and the family was doing the big clean. The father was carrying out the old trunks. The mother was emptying the cupboards. The children were running about with dusters.

In the end, at the side of the road, there was a heap.

A paper umbrella with broken ribs. A faded lantern with a hole in its side. A pair of worn-out sandals, a mortar without its pestle, a dented pot, a broom with bald bristles. Everything that was "no use any more".

Nobody knew it, but those things were nearly a hundred years old. Every one of them was a year short, or perhaps just a few days.

Night fell. The street emptied. A light frost settled on the heap, and silence with it.

“Well, really,” said a low voice at some point.

It was the umbrella. It had opened by itself, with a snap. Through the torn paper an eye had appeared, and below it a long red tongue. It hopped on one foot to the top of the heap.

“I kept three generations dry! The grandfather, the father, and now the son! They patched me, they oiled me, and then… they throw me out!”

“They put out my flame,” said the lantern, with a single eye that lit up in the middle of its paper. “For almost a hundred years I gave light at their door. Every evening I waited for the footsteps of the master coming home late.”

“I ran along their paths!” said a sandal.

“I ground their rice!” said the mortar, in a voice like thunder.

“I swept their floor every morning!” said the broom, and they all started talking at once, shouting, banging, until the pot, its lid jiggling on its head, called for silence.

“We were one year short,” it said. “One year! And now what are we?”

Nobody answered. In the dark, the lantern pulled a face.

“We are what they have made us,” it said. “So let's show them.”

They looked at one another. In almost a hundred years none of them had ever decided anything, except what they had been asked to do: open when it rained, light up when it got dark, carry, grind, sweep. For the first time they could choose. It was a strange feeling, a little dizzying and a little angry, and the mortar, who was the oldest, grumbled that at his age he was not used to it any more.

And so, in the dead of that night, in the empty street, the parade began.

Umbrellas, lanterns, sandals, pots, ladles, mirrors, baskets, drums: from every house, from every street, from every heap where they had been thrown, came objects hopping, rolling, flying, crawling. Each had something strange about it: an eye, a tongue, a pair of arms made of string. They marched in a line, making an unbelievable racket, and the lanterns lit the street with a green glow.

In the houses, people woke up. With their hearts in their mouths they watched the procession go by from behind the windows. A child began to scream. A dog hid under the bed. From that day on, and for many nights, the city did not sleep.

The tsukumogami played tricks, of course: they tipped over soup, put out fires, made sandals dance on the rooftops. They did not want to hurt anyone. They only wanted someone to look at them and say: “You have been useful to us.”

Nobody said it. Everyone was too frightened. And the more people shut their doors, the harder the objects banged, round and round in a circle that seemed as if it would never end. It was a real mess, because neither side understood the other.

One night, though, as the parade wound through the alleys, someone came out into the street and did not run away.

It was a monk, a young one, in a dark robe and with a staff. He planted himself in the middle of the road. The objects stopped, surprised. The umbrella, its tongue dangling, eyed him up and down with its single eye.

“Aren't you running away?”

“No,” said the monk. He sat down on the ground, lit a stick of incense, and for a while said nothing else. Then he began to recite a prayer, softly, the way you sing a lullaby.

The objects listened. Little by little, the lantern lowered its flame. The umbrella closed up. The sandals stopped stamping.

When he had finished, the monk took a cup out of a bag and poured some tea.

“You are right,” he said. “They threw you away before your time, and that is not fair. You have been useful to three generations, and nobody has said thank you. I'll say it, on behalf of everyone: thank you.”

The silence went on for a very long time.

Then the lantern began to tremble. The umbrella wiped its eye with a flap of paper. And the mortar, who looked frightening even when he stood still, burst into sobs.

“So… what should we do?”

“Whatever you like,” said the monk. “But scaring people in their sleep is not the way to be thanked.”

At dawn the street was empty. The heap of things had vanished, and nobody knew where. Someone swore they had seen a line of small shadows climbing towards the mountain, hopping along, with a lantern at the front. It is said that up there, some time later, a little temple appeared, and that the monks who lived in it made strange noises: a creaking of ribs, the swish of a broom, the clink of a lid. Every evening they prayed together in thin little voices. And in that temple, nothing was ever thrown away.

From that day on, in that house, nothing was thrown out on the last day of the year without being thanked first.

And in some temples, even today, people give thanks even for broken needles.