The Upside-Down Woodsman Mask

This happened before I was born, so I didn’t witness it firsthand.
I want to say upfront that, for that reason, there may be parts I’ve unintentionally filled in with my own imagination.
Also, the names of places and people have been changed.

It might sound like an overly theatrical way to begin,
but by the end of this story,
you just might find a shadow standing in your doorway…

The village where I was born was officially dissolved just recently due to a municipal merger,
and was reborn under the name of a different town.
However, the name Senba Kagura still remains.

This yoru-kagura—a sacred night-time ritual dance—
has been passed down without interruption since the Muromachi period (1336–1573).
It was traditionally carried on by four specific families in the village.
The dance was performed to welcome and entertain the gods:
those who bless the rice fields with rich harvests,
and those who bring harsh winters to the mountains.

Each year, the performance would rotate between the village’s local shrines.
Under the watchful eyes of the ujiko (parishioners or shrine affiliates),
the dance continued late into the night.

In the past, only the heads of those four families, known as the tayū, were allowed to perform the kagura.
But now, with all but one of those family lines lost to time—
and the added shortage of young people in the village—
anyone can now take on the role of mai-dayū (chief kagura dancer).

Historical records say that the kagura was originally introduced to those four families
by the Hino clan, who had migrated from the Kumano region.
The head of the Hino family at the time, Hino Sōshirō Atsunori,
is said to have brought with him the kagura masks used in the dance.

And those masks...
would one day come to cast shadows upon the doorways of homes throughout the village.

At Senba Kagura, there are some dances performed without masks,
but most involve wearing one.

The kagura mask is a device that transforms the mai-dayū—the lead dancer—
from a human into something beyond human.
Once the dancer dons the costume and puts on the mask,
they are no longer seen as a person,
but as a demon god (kishin) or supernatural being performing the dance.

For this reason, even though the performance takes place within a shrine,
a shimenawa—a sacred rope used in Shinto rites—is first strung up to create a barrier.
It’s a ritual boundary, meant to safely invite these powerful entities into the human realm.

Old masks passed down through generations are said to hold power,
and they must never be treated carelessly.

In the Senba-yama Monogatari, a text written in the mid-Edo period,
there’s an unsettling passage:

“The Okina mask, in particular, possesses monstrous strength.
If stored together with the other masks in the same case,
it will tear through them as if devouring them.”

Because of this, even today,
the Okina mask is the only kagura mask stored separately,
kept alone in a small case woven from bamboo.

My father was the dancer who performed with the Okina mask.
And he would always say,
“Only when I put on this mask do my hands start to sweat.”

Now then—
Senba Kagura has continued for over five centuries, since the Muromachi period.
But even with that long history, there were times when certain performances were lost.

According to Senba-yama Monogatari, a record left by a government official named Furuya Densuke who was assigned to the Senba region,
as well as other surviving documents,
there are four kagura dances that are no longer performed.

None of these four have surviving masks or ritual chants (saibun) associated with them.
Only the costumes can be vaguely discerned through illustrations in the old manuscripts.

And so—
this tale begins with the strange events that unfolded
when one of those long-lost dances came back to life.

On May 11, 1922 (Taishō 11), a report came into the village office:
a set of kagura masks had been discovered.

They had been found, along with a handful of documents,
inside the earthen storehouse of an old household known as the Takahashi family.

The Takahashi family had once served as lead coordinators of the kagura for several generations.
At some point, however, when no male heir was born to inherit the role,
they brought in an adopted son—and from that generation onward, the family drifted away from the tradition.

For reasons unknown, the kagura masks and the accompanying dance
were never passed down to the next tayū (chief dancer).
And that, it seems, is how one of the performances came to be lost.

Though the masks had been recovered,
it was still impossible to revive the dance itself.
The ritual chant (saibun) had not been found.

Still, momentum was building among villagers eager to bring back the lost kagura performance.
A plan was proposed: to send someone to Kumano—
the ancestral homeland of the Hino family, who had first brought kagura to Senba—
and attempt to reconstruct the lost piece by referencing similar dances from the region.

Around that time, something strange happened.
Hiroomi Morimoto—the kagura leader at the time and the man heading up the revival project—had an unusual dream.

Morimoto was also the head of the local volunteer fire brigade.
He was known for being upright and sincere, and was respected throughout the village for his fairness.

One night, after a kagura performance had taken place,
he was so exhausted from dancing that he didn’t return home.
Instead, he fell asleep alone inside the shrine’s main sanctuary.

That was when the dream came.
He described it as a dream cloaked in total darkness—
a darkness so deep it resembled a remote mountain forest at night.

As he stood there alone in the pitch-black void,
a small bonfire suddenly flared to life before him.
From the depths of the darkness, a figure began to slowly approach.

The person wore strange garments and a white mask.
As Morimoto looked closer, he realized what it was—
the mask was a kagura mask, the very same Yamahime (Mountain Princess) mask
that had been found in the Takahashi family’s storehouse.

The figure wore layered robes with a white cloth draped over them,
and upon their face was the Yamahime mask.
They stepped forward, standing just before the firelight,
and then spoke directly to Morimoto:

“From this moment on, I bestow upon you the Dance of the Mountain Princess.”

And then, they began to dance—quietly, solemnly.

Morimoto said he knew, with absolute certainty,
that this was no ordinary dream.
He watched with everything he had, trying not to miss a single gesture or movement of the dance.

When the Mountain Princess finished her dance,
the bonfire suddenly went out, and a deep curtain of darkness fell once more.

But the dream didn’t end.
It didn’t fade.

A moment later, the bonfire lit up again.
This time, another figure appeared—
wearing a red, fierce-looking mask that resembled a raging demon god.

The figure stepped forward and said:
“Now, I bestow upon you the Dance of the Fire God.”

Unlike the graceful, solemn movements of the Mountain Princess,
this dance was wild and intense.
Each step radiated raw, explosive power.

And the mask this figure wore—
it too was one of the kagura masks that had been discovered in the Takahashi family’s storehouse.

When the dance ended, the bonfire was extinguished once again—
only to flare up yet again in the darkness.

This time, a man emerged from the shadows,
wearing formal layered robes and a traditional eboshi cap.
But unlike the others, he wore no mask.
His face was bare, aged, with deep lines etched into the corners of his eyes—
a man clearly in his late middle age.

He spoke:
“Now, I bestow upon you the Dance of the Autumn Bush Clover.”
(Hagi no Mai)

Upon hearing his voice, Morimoto realized the truth.
It was this man—this very person—
who had performed all the dances before.

As he watched the final dance unfold,
Morimoto was moved to tears.
Each of the dances was filled with passion,
and yet none of them felt like they came from a human body.
They were divine, otherworldly—
as if gods themselves were dancing.

When he awoke, lying on the tatami floor of the shrine’s inner sanctum,
Morimoto stood up immediately
and began to reenact the dances he had just seen.

He struggled, repeated each movement over and over, refining every step.
By the time the first rays of sunlight lit the mountains to the east,
he had succeeded—
bringing all three dances back into the world, exactly as they had been performed in his dream.

And that is how the three lost dances were restored to Senba Kagura.
To this day, the story is passed down in Senba as a sacred origin tale.

It is believed that the man who appeared in Morimoto’s dream that night
was none other than Jūjirō Takahashi, the head of the Takahashi family five generations prior.

At that time, the ōtome—the eldest woman of the Takahashi family—was said to be nearly one hundred years old.
When she witnessed the dances that Morimoto had reconstructed,
she broke down in tears, saying they were exactly the same as the ones her great-grandfather had performed
when she was a child.

And so, three of the four lost dances were returned:

— The Dance of the Mountain Princess
— The Dance of the Fire God
— The Dance of the Autumn Bush Clover

According to Senba-yama Monogatari, the final missing piece was
The Dance of the Woodsman (Ki no Mai).

However, the woodsman mask (kikori-men) required for the performance was never found in the Takahashi storehouse.
That meant the Dance of the Woodsman remained lost.

The records state that the woodsman mask had originally been brought
by Hino Sōshirō Atsunori from Kumano when he first came to Senba.
It was said to bear the inscription: “Meiō 7” (1498).

At one time, the mask was thought to be the same as the Okina mask mentioned earlier,
but since the Okina mask bears a different inscription—“Eiroku 5” (1562)—
it is now understood that they are separate artifacts.

Time passed—
and the year was 1965, in the Shōwa era.

It was around the time when my father had just begun his training
to become a mai-dayū, the lead dancer of the kagura.

Since the kagura masks had been discovered at the Takahashi family home during the Taishō era,
the village office, with help from the old families,
had carried out extensive searches for the missing woodsman mask.

And yet, no matter how thoroughly they searched,
the kikori-men—the mask required for the Dance of the Woodsman—was never found.

Until now.

Suddenly, it surfaced.

Just like that.
Easily.

And with it came a curse so terrifying,
it left everyone who saw it trembling.

At the time, my father was working at a construction company based in the village.
That’s where he first heard the news:
“The woodsman mask has been found.”

The company president was himself a former mai-dayū,
and he had been the one who encouraged my father to take up kagura dancing in the first place.
So when my father asked to leave early, the president readily agreed.

Without wasting a moment,
my father got into his car and drove straight to the Tsuchiya residence in the Yahagi hamlet,
where the mask was said to have been discovered.

Yahagi, even within the mountainous Senba region,
was known for its especially rugged and remote terrain.
Though not as blatant as in the towns,
the area had historically been subject to what is now known as buraku discrimination.
Even in my father’s time, remnants of that old prejudice still lingered.
He would later say that it wasn’t a place people liked to go without a good reason.

The Tsuchiya family, who lived in that hamlet,
were said to be descended from travelers who had come across the prefectural border from the mountains.
Despite their outsider lineage,
they had long held the role of shōya—village headman—within the local community.

The Tsuchiya residence was a large, old estate said to have stood since the Edo period.
By the time my father arrived, several people had already gathered there, having caught wind of the rumors.

At the entrance, an elderly woman—perhaps in her sixties—who appeared to be the mother-in-law of the household,
was locked in a heated argument with a man wearing an armband from the village office.

While the two were quarreling,
my father found one of his fellow kagura performers, who had arrived before him,
and was quickly brought up to speed on what had happened.

Apparently, that very morning,
the village office had received an anonymous phone call.

The caller said, simply:
“There’s a house that’s hiding the woodsman mask.”

And then they added:
“It’s the Tsuchiya family.”
That was all. The line went dead.

Though the whole thing seemed suspicious,
an official from the Board of Education was sent to the Tsuchiya home to investigate.

When questioned, the family admitted it plainly:
“Yes, we do have the woodsman mask.”

The argument seemed to have reached a stalemate,
but eventually, the Tsuchiya family relented and allowed my father and the others into the house.

As one might expect from a household of such historical pedigree,
the residence contained multiple large rooms with tatami floors,
and after walking down a long corridor,
they stopped in front of the innermost room on the mountain-facing side—
the deepest chamber in the house, farthest from the front entrance.

My father had been imagining some kind of hidden chamber or secret vault
where the mask might have been sealed away.
But what he saw instead left him a bit underwhelmed.

As the old woman slid open the sliding doors to the inner room,
he saw it—
the black face of the woodsman mask.

But in that same moment,
a low murmur of awe rose from the gathered crowd—
a sound that seemed closer to reverence than surprise.

“You must not enter the room,”
the old woman said firmly.
“I’m telling you this for your own good. Please, leave now.”

My father would later describe it like this:
“From the pitch-black room with no lights,
a heavy, dark presence—like some malignant aura—was drifting down the corridor toward us.”
In the pitch-black shadows of the sealed-off inner room,
the woodsman mask was hanging on a large central pillar.

But there was something wrong.
The mask had been mounted upside down—completely inverted.
Top and bottom reversed.

At first, it had seemed like it was simply hanging there,
but as everyone’s eyes adjusted to the darkness,
they realized something else entirely.

The mask hadn’t been hung.
It had been nailed to the pillar.

Each eye of the mask had been pierced with a heavy nail,
driven deep into the wood.

One of the elder kagura performers, visibly shaken,
stepped forward and confronted the old woman.

“How could you do such a thing?” he demanded.
But before the situation escalated, a staff member from the Board of Education held him back.

“I’m removing it. No matter what,” the official said.
But the old woman snapped back, her voice firm and cold:
“Even if it means blinding it?”

My father was overwhelmed by a wave of unbearable chills.
A deep, crawling cold that gnawed at the spine.

According to the old woman,
that mask—hung upside down and nailed through the eyes—
was radiating a powerful curse.

She claimed that anyone who stepped into that room
would eventually go blind. Every single one of them.

No one scoffed.
No one laughed it off as nonsense.
No one dared to step inside.

It wasn’t simply belief—
they understood.

They understood that old kagura masks held power.
That’s why the Okina mask was kept alone,
sealed in a small case.
Why the Hannya mask—said to change its expression if left unused for a year—was always carefully maintained.

You couldn’t remove the mask without entering the room.
But if you entered, you risked losing your sight.

And so, the Tsuchiya family had chosen to leave the woodsman mask untouched.
Unmoved. Unremoved.

The tatami-matted room contained no furniture, no decoration.
Just layers of dust and soot covering the floor.

“This room has been like this,” the old woman said,
“since before the Meiji era.”

As the group stood there wondering what could be done,
one of the kagura performers suddenly clapped his hands and said,
“Why not send Tarōbō from across the road to retrieve it? He’s blind, after all.”

My father thought, That makes sense.
Indeed, the son of the house across from the Tsuchiya family—Tarōbō—was visually impaired.
If he couldn’t see, then he wouldn't be affected by the mask.
He could go in and remove it safely.

But the old woman only shook her head, her face shadowed and grave.
And then, quietly, with a solemn tone,
she began to speak—
telling the story of the curse bound to the woodsman mask.

Long ago, it is said that the four families who received the kagura tradition
from Hino Sōshirō Atsunori all prospered greatly.

But according to the old woman,
the Tsuchiya family had inherited a kagura tradition even older than those four.

Like the Hino family, the Tsuchiyas had once been marōdo—travelers or outsiders invited into the community.
And it was they, not the Hinos,
who had first brought kagura to the village of Senba.

In fact, she said, the Tsuchiya family had originally served as the true founders—
the sōke, or principal lineage—of what would later become known as Senba Kagura.

However, after the Hino family arrived from afar with their own kagura style,
the Tsuchiyas were gradually pushed out.
Their position was overtaken,
and many of their original dances, masks—including the Mountain Princess—and even the origin myths were taken from them.

And this very woodsman mask, the old woman claimed,
was a sacred relic passed down through the Tsuchiya line,
brought from a distant, unknown land by their ancestors.

The documents that trace the mask’s origin to the Hino family?
All of them, she said, were falsified—deliberately altered to rewrite the history.

Perhaps because of this buried resentment and complicated history,
even after the kagura tradition had crumbled among the four original families,
a strict custom remained:

No one from the Tsuchiya family would ever become a kagura dancer again.

But toward the end of the Edo period,
a member of the Tsuchiya family was finally chosen to serve as a mai-dayū—the lead kagura dancer.

His name was Jinpei Tsuchiya.
Without hesitation, he requested to dance wearing the woodsman mask.

But that night, after putting on the mask,
Jinpei lost his mind beneath a tree full of fading cherry blossoms.
He ran through the village in a frenzy, shouting in a voice
that was said to sound not of this world:

“Let the earth and the rice wither away.
Let the streams and wells dry up and die.”

Then—still wearing the mask—
he drove nails through both of his eyes
and threw himself off the cliff at the edge of the village, ending his life.

His sister later removed the mask from his corpse,
took it back in secret,
and nailed it upside down to the central pillar in the Tsuchiya family’s inner room.

From that year onward, the village was struck by an unprecedented famine.
And it is said that in houses where a shadow appeared at the front door,
deaths began to occur—deaths without cause, or reason, or warning.

Though it bore the face of a woodsman,
the mask was, in truth, a god.

And that god—
was forced to speak in another god’s voice,
and dance another god’s dance.

It was said that such sacrilege
caused the mask’s wrath to simmer, slowly,
over countless long years.

And when the time came,
it borrowed Jinpei’s body
to spew forth its curse across the entire village.

It was, in a sense,
a revenge from the Tsuchiya style of kagura
against the Hino style that had usurped it.

That woodsman mask remains to this day,
still nailed upside down in the Tsuchiya family’s inner chamber,
continuing to curse this village.

After hearing that dreadful tale—
a history of grudges and blasphemy passed down in secret—
my father and the others stood frozen in place.

The old woman, her face now slightly softened,
seemed like a burden had finally lifted from her.

She exhaled and said:

“Tarō can’t go in.
If he does… he won’t survive this time.”

At those words, the performers and officials all stirred.
They understood immediately what she meant.

She was saying,
“The reason Tarō is blind…
is because, once before,
he stepped into that room
to retrieve the mask.”

In the end, the group left the Tsuchiya residence.
They gathered at a nearby shrine
to discuss what should be done.

Someone suggested breaking through the wall
and removing the mask from behind the inner chamber.
But after some debate,
they came to a single conclusion:

“Unless we can convince the Tsuchiya family themselves,
we can’t commit such an act of lawlessness.”

And yet, they couldn’t just leave things as they were.
With their heads in their hands,
they struggled to find a way forward.

That was when an old man arrived
at the shrine where they were holding the meeting.

The man appeared to be in his nineties—ancient and hunched with age.
And yet, he declared plainly:
“I will remove the woodsman mask.”

“If no human can do it,” he said,
“then let something not quite human do it instead.”

The group returned once more to the Tsuchiya residence.
They explained the situation to the old woman.

She took the old man’s hand in hers,
nodded silently,
and led them into the inner chamber.

When she slid open the doors and revealed the mask again,
my father and the others recoiled instinctively.
The oppressive presence still lingered—thick and heavy.

But then, from the adjacent room,
a white figure emerged.

And in that moment,
a deep, unexplainable sense of calm washed over everyone.

The old man was dressed in formal kagura robes,
a white cloth draped over his shoulders,
and wore the Mountain Princess mask—Yamahime.

He walked forward, slowly and with dignity,
as if possessed by something far greater than himself.

Then, singing a sacred chant,
he began to dance—softly, solemnly—
as he stepped across the threshold into the chamber.

Before my father and the others,
a mysterious, otherworldly scene was unfolding—
one they could only watch in breathless silence.
In the darkness of the chamber,
something not quite human, draped in white,
was dancing.

To the steady rhythm of the kagura drum,
beaten softly by one of the tayū,
the Mountain Princess moved without pause—
her feet never stopping, never faltering.

She traced slow circles through the room,
drawing ever closer to the central pillar
where the woodsman mask awaited.

And then, the moment her hand reached out and touched the mask—
the nails driven through its eyes
suddenly crumbled away and fell to the floor.

They had likely rotted,
having been buried in wood for over a hundred years.
That’s the logical explanation.

But my father didn’t think so.
Not in that moment.

He understood, deeply and without doubt,
that what lay beyond those sliding doors
was no longer part of the human world.

And in such a place,
nothing—no matter how impossible—
seemed strange.

Just as the dance was drawing to a close,
the Mountain Princess stepped out from the inner chamber,
carrying the black woodsman mask in her hands.

“I never thought I’d dance again,”
said the old man—Hiroomi Morimoto—
as he gently removed the Yamahime mask from his face.

The very man who had once revived
The Dance of the Mountain Princess,
The Dance of the Fire God,
and The Dance of the Autumn Bush Clover—

now, at last,
had reclaimed the mask of the final dance:
The Dance of the Woodsman.

Overcome with a feeling he could not explain,
my father wept uncontrollably.

After that day, the woodsman mask was enshrined
at a local shrine affiliated with the Tsuchiya family.

Though the dance is never performed publicly,
The Dance of the Woodsman had, in fact,
been passed down in secret within the Tsuchiya family.

And with that,
all four of the lost kagura dances
had finally been restored.

Later, my father had the chance to speak with Morimoto once more,
and asked him what it meant to be a mai-dayū.

The old man simply said:

“When you are unmasked, you face the gods as a human.
When you wear the mask, you face humanity as a god.”

Then he smiled,
and added:

“Only when your body and soul become one with the divine
will you begin to see what lies beyond.”

Within the tradition of Senba Kagura,
it is suggested through the performances that the Woodsman and the Mountain Princess share a romantic bond.

However, it is said that dances such as The Dance of the Mountain Princess
were once entirely different between the ancient Tsuchiya style and the Hino style.

By the time these traditions reached the present day,
only The Dance of the Woodsman had survived within the Tsuchiya lineage.

As for the Mountain Princess and other such dances—
while they may share the same masks as the Hino style,
what those performances once truly were
is now completely unknown.

But Morimoto, the old man, once said that during the dance
when he retrieved the woodsman mask,
he could feel it—
that the Mountain Princess truly loved the Woodsman.

“I’m certain that even in the ancient form of the dance,
the Princess and the Woodsman were lovers.
That’s why the mask allowed itself to be brought out of that room.”

At those words, my father quietly nodded.

I believe kagura is a way of communicating with gods—
gods who are wild and unruly,
who give without asking, and take without warning.

We host them with food and song,
praise them, mock them, appease them.
Through the dance, we deliver the silent prayers of the weak who live in the village,
and in turn, we try to understand the gods' will.

You could replace the word god with nature,
and the meaning would not change.

I once heard someone say
that the gods of Japan are quick to anger.

But with that rage
comes something else as well—
there is almost always a way to calm it.

Perhaps,
for the woodsman mask that had brooded in silence for so long,
cursing Senba with its grief and fury,
the dance of the Mountain Princess—
as performed by old Morimoto—
was just that.

A way to be calmed.

Some years after that event—before I was even born—
many people claimed they had seen a shadow
standing at the front door of Morimoto’s house.

It was the same shadow said to appear
when the curse of the woodsman mask took hold—
the shadow that foretold death without cause or reason.

But that day,
it wasn’t a senseless death.

It was the final moment
of a mai-dayū who had lived for nearly a century—
a peaceful passing.
A life brought to its natural close.