Kachi-kachi Yama

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Kachi-Kachi Yama (Japanese: かちかち山, kachi-kachi being an onomatopoeia of the sound a fire makes and yama meaning "mountain", roughly translates to "Fire-Crackle Mountain"), is one of the few Japanese folktales in which a tanuki is the villain, rather than the boisterous and well-endowed alcoholic.

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[edit] Story

[edit] The trouble-making tanuki

As the story goes, a man caught a troublesome tanuki in his fields, and tied it to a tree to kill and cook it later. When the man left for town, the tanuki cried and begged the man's wife to set him free, promising never to bother the fields again. After much convincing, the wife set the animal free, only to have it turn on her and kill her. But instead of just running off, the tanuki planned a foul trick.

Using its shapeshifting abilities, the tanuki took on the form of the wife and cooked up a soup, using the dead woman's flesh. When the man came home, the tanuki served him the soup. After the meal, the man remarked that the soup was good, and the tanuki, shifting back to his normal self, cried out mockingly, "It was me that you were going to eat, but you've just eaten your own wife instead!" With that, the cruel creature ran off, leaving the poor man in shock and horrible grief.

[edit] Enter the rabbit

It just so happened that the unfortunate couple had been good friends with a rabbit that lived nearby. When the rabbit heard about what happened, he immediately came to the man and told him, "I'll avenge the death of your wife for you!" So the rabbit set out and soon found the villainous tanuki. Pretending to befriend the tanuki, the rabbit did all sorts of unpleasant things to him, from dropping a bee's nest on him to 'treating' the stings with a peppery poultice that burned.

The title of the story comes from the especially painful trick that the rabbit played. The tanuki was carrying a heavy load of kindling on his back to make a campfire for the night. He was so burdened that he did not immediately notice when the rabbit set fire to the kindling. Soon, the crackling sound reached his ears.

"What is that sound?" the tanuki asked.

"It is Kachi-Kachi Yama" the rabbit replied. "We are not far from it, so it is no surprise that you can hear it!"

Eventually, the fire reached the tanuki's back, burning him badly, but without killing him.

[edit] Boat of mud

After all the horrible things that the rabbit had put him through, the tanuki challenged the rabbit to a life or death contest to prove who was the better creature. They were each to build a boat, and race across a lake in them. The rabbit carved his boat out of a fallen tree trunk, but the foolish tanuki fashioned his out of mud.

The two competitors each got off to a great start, but as they approached the middle of the lake, the tanuki's mud boat dissolved and came apart. As the tanuki was struggling to stay afloat, the rabbit proclaimed that he was a friend of the human couple, and that this was the tanuki’s punishment for his horrible deeds. His boat gone, the tanuki drowned.

[edit] Modern-day references

There is a railway station in Japan, called the Shikoku Tanuki Train Line, that adopts the slogan, "Our trains aren't made of mud", a direct reference to the "Kachi-Kachi Yama" tale.

[edit] External links