The White Thing in the Rice Paddy, Brother Picked Up the Binoculars and Took a Look

Japan’s “くねくね”, roughly translated as “wriggling” or “twisting back and forth”. The version of this story I saw is about two brothers.

In summer, the two brothers returned to their grandparents’ home in the countryside and played outside. In the distance, in the middle of a rice paddy, there was a white thing that kept wriggling, its movements soft and boneless. The younger brother asked what it was, and the older brother said it was a scarecrow, but even when the wind stopped, it kept wriggling.

The older brother went back into the house and got a pair of binoculars. After looking for a while, his face turned white all of a sudden, the binoculars fell to the ground, and he slowly spat out one sentence from his mouth, roughly meaning: it’s better not to know. That voice no longer sounded like the older brother.

The younger brother wanted to pick it up and look himself, but his grandfather rushed out from somewhere, grabbed him by the arm, and asked: Did you look? He said no, and only then did his grandfather let go, sit down on the ground with a thump, and cry. Back at home, everyone was crying, except the older brother, who stood in the middle of the room, laughing, and twisting, once after another, just like that thing.

Later, the adults couldn’t say clearly what it was either; they only said that in the countryside, some people call it the “god” of the rice paddies, others say it’s someone who died from overwork in the rice paddies, and still others say it’s something from a plague. Anyway, once you see it, you’ll turn out like that.

The origin of this story can be traced. It was first written in 2000 by someone on a website that accepted submissions of strange tales, then it was altered by others; when it was posted on a forum in 2003, the poster explicitly wrote “this is made up”. As it was passed along, that sentence was dropped, and the story continued on its own. Nowadays, when young people in Japan talk about it, many assume it’s an old strange tale that has been passed down in the countryside for many years.

#Paranormal #网络转载 #日本怪谈