Kachi-kachi Yama
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.
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 set up something really nasty.
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.
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.
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
tanukis 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 tanukis punishment for his horrible deeds. His boat gone, the
tanuki drowned.
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.
