江户有个被天狗带走的少年，学者把他的话都记下来了

In the late Edo period, around 1820, there was a boy in his early teens named Torakichi, who stood at the gate of a temple in Edo and told people that he had once been taken away by a tengu.

He said that when he was seven, he was playing by a pond in Ueno when he saw an old medicine seller squatting there, with a small pot in front of him. The old man called him over and told him to get inside the pot. He stepped in, and in a flash, the pot flew away, traveling all the way to a distant mountain called Iwazama-yama in Hitachi Province. Inside the mountain was a small temple; the old man was the leader of the tengu, named Sugiyama Sōjō, who taught him reading, writing, drawing talismans, how to treat illnesses, and how to exorcise evil spirits for people. Sometimes, in a single day, he could travel to faraway places, flying straight through the clouds.

At the time, the kokugaku scholar Hirata Atsutane heard about this and took Torakichi into his home for two years, questioning him every day and writing it all into a book called *Senkyo I-bun*. The book contains Torakichi's descriptions of what the mountain looked like, what the tengu wore and ate, what characters they used, and which gods were enshrined in various regions, all written in great detail. Hirata took it very seriously; he wanted to learn what the invisible world looked like from this child's mouth.

The people around had their own opinions: some thought it was made up by the child, others thought he had been kidnapped and had a bellyful of stories instilled in him. Torakichi later left Hirata's household, and what happened to him afterward varies by account.

The term "kamikakushi" in Japan means being taken away by spirits. In ancient times, when a child suddenly disappeared and returned a few days later saying strange things, adults would explain it this way. Torakichi's account is the most complete version of this kind of story.

#Ghosts #网络转载 #日本怪谈