CHIBUSA-ENOKI
Lore
The name Chibusa-enoki is made of two roots: chibusa, "breast," and enoki, the Japanese hackberry, a tree in the elm family. The hackberry itself is revered as sacred, yet its trunk bears swellings that look uncannily like a woman's breasts. Chibusa-enoki is classed as a vengeful spirit bound to a single, living tree.
According to the best-known tale, the setting is old Higo Province. A young samurai was summoned to serve his daimyo. After a tearful farewell he left behind a wife and their newborn son. The woman waited alone, trusting in her husband's swift return. But next door lived a neighbor who had long envied her beauty and good fortune. Driven by jealousy, the neighbor slipped into the house one night, murdered the mother, and buried the body at the roots of a great enoki on the village edge.
A mother's love, however, did not perish with her life. Soon people began hearing a faint baby's cry coming from the tree after dark, yet no one dared investigate. Around the same time a local monk had a strange dream. A woman appeared, bowed low, and said, "My child is hungry. Please, find him and feed him at the tree." Awakening, the monk hurried to the hackberry on the outskirts, where he heard the same thin wail drifting up from the massive roots. Raising his lamp, he found beneath the overhang a living but exhausted infant. The child was reaching toward the trunk, and from the wood dripped a milky sap that had kept him alive.
Astonished, the monk carried the boy to the temple. News raced through the village like lightning: some spoke of a miracle, others of a terrible crime. A search began for the missing mother, and before long her body was found beneath the enoki. When the husband returned weeks later, he demanded justice. The neighbor denied everything, but at night she saw the blood-stained woman and heard the dead mother's whispers. Tormented beyond endurance, she confessed and was executed. Yet villagers say she was already mad before the sentence, and death felt more like a release than a punishment.
