Iwate Prefecture

In The Legends of Tono, a collection of folktales from Iwate Prefecture in rural northern Japan, sound is often a link between the everyday world and the spirit realm. In the nineteenth century, the villagers, farmers and hunters who feature in the stories were largely cut off from the rest of Japan by the rugged mountains surrounding the city of Tono. Venturing into the hills to hunt, gather plants or make charcoal, they would hear things that made their blood run cold. 

“Nothing is more frightening than the howling of a wolf,” recounts one such tale. Others mention strange screams or whooshing sounds in the forest, a sign of the long-nosed tengu goblins who were known to carry off women and girls, their disappearances dubbed kamikakushi—being spirited away. The stories were handed down to the pioneering folklorist Kunio Yanagita, who compiled them and dozens more into the renowned Legends anthology, published in 1910. The tales feature ghosts, shape-shifting foxes, kappa water imps and all manner of other yokai spirits, as well as the vibrant folk dances still seen today at the annual Tono Festival. The book not only helped formalize folklore studies in Japan, but made the city of Tono a mecca for fans of Japanese spooks. 

The Japanese wolf has been extinct for over a century. The landscape around present-day Tono, a city of around 32,000 people, abounds instead with birdsong, the music of crickets and brooks babbling through rice paddies. Beloved nature spots include the Gohyaku Rakan woods, with 500 images of Buddhist disciples carved from moss-covered rocks; Kappabuchi Pool, a tree-lined stream said to be inhabited by kappa; and Mount Hayachine (6,289 feet/1,917 m), some forty-five minutes by car from Tono Station. The city’s natural setting, and its evocative oral history, make it an ideal location to experiment with field recordings: the capture of ambient sounds outside a studio, often in a natural environment. These recordings can serve as a unique sound souvenir that can immediately bring one back to a time and place. 

Inspired by Legends, sound artist Yosi Horikawa recently traveled to Tono, braving the forests at midnight to do some field recording of his own. He picked up owls hooting, insects chirping and deer running. “Real sounds are important because they’re connected to my experience and memory,” says Horikawa, an Osaka native who mixes these natural sounds with electronic music. “I’m specially interested in the sound of water for its variation, from one drop to a river to an ocean; I can make a rhythm out of water alone.”