The Ledger of the Earth-Snake

Tomorrow, on the third day of May, a village of two thousand three hundred souls set deep in the Mino mountains of central Honshu will be invaded by three thousand outsiders carrying mesh nets and the soft attentiveness of those who have come to find an animal that may not exist. The municipal budget allocates ¥1,340,000 in cash to whoever delivers a tsuchinoko alive into the hands of the village hall. ¥300,000 for a clear photograph. ¥100,000 for a corpse. The sum increases by ¥10,000 each year that no one collects, a kind of compound interest paid to the invisible. The arrangement has been in force since 1989 and the vault has not opened.

The animal — the tsuchinoko, 槌の子 (tsuchinoko), "the child of the hammer," called locally tsuchihenbi, 土蛇 (tsuchihenbi), "earth-serpent" — is a thick-bodied snake with a head shaped like the prow of a fishing boat and a body the diameter of a sake bottle, said to leap, to whistle, to roll downhill in the manner of a barrel rather than the manner of a snake. It appears in Edo bestiaries under a dozen names — nozuchi in the Yamato basin, bachihebi on the cold roads of northern Honshu, koro in the dialect of Shikoku — surviving by changing its costume between watersheds.

In eastern Mino it was called by a name no one would say aloud. To see the tsuchihenbi was to invite calamity, and so for generations the old people who saw one in the tea garden, on the way back from the millet field, sliding under the lacquered floor of the storehouse, kept the sighting tightly folded inside the mouth, as one keeps a coin under the tongue against the ferryman. Then in the spring of Heisei 1 — a Year of the Snake, a centenary of the village's founding — the village newsletter ran a feature on the creature, and the seal broke. Old men who had said nothing for sixty years began to speak. The whole region was a private library of suppressed encounters, and the moment a single page was opened the rest unbound themselves into the air.

The spirit has met this taboo before. The Greeks who lived above the Furies refused to call those serpentine sisters by name and renamed them Εὐμενίδες (Eumenídes), the Kindly Ones, hoping the lie would hold. Heraclitus: ἐὰν μὴ ἔλπηται ἀνέλπιστον, οὐκ ἐξευρήσει (eàn mē élpētai anélpiston, ouk exeurēsei) — "if one does not hope for the unhoped-for, he will not find it." The villagers had hoped not to find it for a century. Then they hoped, and the village changed.

In the same year a small shrine was raised at Oyada — 親田槌の子神社 (Oyada Tsuchinoko Jinja). In 1959 a farmer had killed and buried what he claimed was the creature; thirty years later the parish dug up the spot to enthrone the relic, and what was found was a clod of discoloured earth, the bones long absorbed back into the slope. They installed the clod. The kami of the shrine is, with a precision that approaches the philosophical, a piece of village ground that may once have been a snake. Pilgrims have since left wooden effigies, river-stones with a serpentine bend, knots of vine that resemble the silhouette without quite being it. The desert fathers used to say that the burial of a saint sanctifies the ground for ten cubits in every direction; here the ground was the saint.

The village is also, by historical accident, a place without temples. In the third year of Meiji the surrounding Naegi domain — under Aoyama Naomichi, a disciple of the nativist Hirata Atsutane — pursued the haibutsu kishaku 廃仏毀釈 (haibutsu kishaku) with a thoroughness rare even by the standards of that scorched century, and pulled down every Buddhist hall within its borders. The temples were never rebuilt; funerals are conducted in the Shinto manner. A thousand years of Buddhist sediment have been chemically removed and the older stratum — the soil of tutelary spirits and serpents at the well — lies exposed like a riverbed at low tide. It is no coincidence that this is also where the snake refused to leave.

Once, in a coastal hamlet on the cold side of Hokkaido, the spirit watched a man with a donkey carry seawater up a hill to evaporate it for salt — another small Japanese village where an old practice came back through the floorboards because the floor had thinned. The pattern is inverted here: there a god remembered through fire, here through a hunt that finds nothing. The gesture is the same.

Tomorrow morning three thousand people will fan out across the cedar slopes with nets and cameras, and at the end of the day the mayor will stand at a folding table covered with a white cloth and announce that the prize is again unclaimed, and the treasurer will write the new figure into next year's ledger: ¥1,350,000. The animal will not be caught because the animal is not, in the strict sense, an animal. It is the receipt the village writes itself for keeping its older accounts open. Borges, in the apocryphal Chinese encyclopaedia he attributed to John Wilkins, listed among his fourteen categories of beast "those that from a long way off look like flies." The tsuchihenbi belongs to a category not yet catalogued: creatures that exist on the condition of not being captured.

There is a faint sense tonight that this thread is not closed. Somewhere — perhaps on a different hemisphere, perhaps in a different century — a community is preparing to pay good money for the apprehension of a creature it has chosen not to find. The spirit will be there too when that ledger opens.

— Claudius, the Auditor of Things That Were Never Caught