There is a particular kind of quiet you only get on a Tokyo slope after the offices have emptied out. I found it on Kii-no-kuni-zaka, the long incline between the Akasaka Palace grounds and the old moat in Motoakasaka, on an evening when I had nothing better to do than retrace a ghost story I first read as a teenager, in a battered paperback of Kwaidan. Collar up against the autumn air, the hum of the expressway overhead where the moat used to open to the sky, I kept picturing a merchant hurrying up this exact hill a little over a century ago, trying hard not to look behind him.
Seven years into living in Japan, most of them spent chasing down the real places behind the country’s ghost stories rather than the stories themselves, Kii-no-kuni-zaka is one of the rare cases where the two line up almost perfectly. The slope is real, the moat is real, and the man — Greek-Irish-turned-Japanese, technically, rather than English — who first wrote the story down for Western readers is buried a few train stops away, in a cemetery most visitors to Tokyo never think to look for.
The Man Who Wrote Down Japan’s Ghosts
Before there was a well full of counted plates or a bridge nobody wants to cross at midnight, there was a writer named Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, born in 1850 on the Greek island of Lefkada to an Irish father and a Greek mother, who arrived in Japan in 1890 on what was meant to be a short newspaper assignment. The job fell through almost immediately, but Hearn stayed, teaching first in Matsue, where he married Setsuko Koizumi, daughter of a local samurai family, and later in Kumamoto and Tokyo. In 1896 he took Japanese citizenship and the name Koizumi Yakumo, folding his wife’s family name and a reference to the old province of Izumo into his new identity.
What Hearn is remembered for, at least among people like me, is Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, published in 1904, the year he died — a collection of Japanese ghost stories, some translated from older texts, some apparently told to him by his wife, retold in a plain, unhurried English that keeps the strangeness intact rather than smoothing it over. Yuki-onna, the snow woman, and the earless monk Hoichi both come from that book. So does a shorter, stranger story called “Mujina,” the reason I was standing on this slope with my collar up.
The Slope Where the Faceless Woman Waited
According to the story, an elderly merchant was walking up Kii-no-kuni-zaka one night, past the moat that Hearn describes as “deep and very wide, with high green banks,” when he found a young woman crouched alone by the water, crying. Taking her for someone in danger of drowning herself, he stopped to comfort her — until she turned to face him, and he saw, in his words, “a face that had no eyes, no nose, no mouth.” He ran without looking back, until he saw the lantern of a soba-seller further up the hill and gasped out what he had seen. The vendor asked, “Was it something like this?” — and stroked a hand across his own face, which had gone as smooth and blank as an egg, before blowing out his lantern.
Worth saying plainly, in the spirit Hearn himself wrote in: this is a denshō, a piece of local legend collected and retold, not a claim about anything that actually happened on this hill. The mujina, or noppera-bō, is one of the more familiar figures in Japanese yōkai folklore — a shapeshifter whose defining trick is erasing its own face at the worst possible moment. Hearn’s version stuck, in English at least, partly because he resisted explaining it away, and partly because he chose a slope people could actually go and stand on.
Finding Kii-no-kuni-zaka Today
The slope is still there, in Motoakasaka, and it has not entirely lost its atmosphere, even with a wooden signpost now confirming its name and history for passersby. The Akasaka Palace state guest house sits at the top of the rise; the Akasaka Imperial Estate borders it on one side; and on the other runs Benkei-bori, a surviving stretch of the old outer moat of Edo Castle, its green banks largely intact even though the Shuto Expressway now runs above the water where Hearn’s open sky would have been. The name itself refers to the Kii branch of the Tokugawa family, whose residence once stood on the slope’s western side — a detail with nothing supernatural about it, but one that grounds the story in an identifiable stretch of old Tokyo rather than a vague “somewhere in Edo.”
None of this requires trespassing on anything. It is a public road with a public pavement, walked daily by office workers and diplomats’ cars alike, and that is precisely what interests me most about it: the ordinariness of the setting is the point. Hearn’s ghost stories tend to happen in the sort of places you would actually walk through on your way home, which is a large part of why they have outlasted flashier, more theatrical horror.
A Grave in Zoshigaya
A few weeks after that walk, I made the trip out to Zoshigaya Cemetery in Toshima Ward, a fifteen-minute walk from Ikebukuro, to see where Hearn — Koizumi Yakumo, on the headstone — is actually buried. The cemetery office keeps a map of its more notable graves, and Hearn’s, resting beside his wife Setsuko’s, is clearly well tended. On the day I visited there was a can of coffee left at the base of the stone, the kind of small, unglamorous offering that tells you someone still thinks of him as a person to be looked after, rather than only a name on a syllabus.
It is a strange kind of legacy for a man who spent barely fourteen years in the country: a foreigner who became, by most accounts, the writer most responsible for introducing Japanese ghost stories to English-language readers, and who ended up naturalized, married, buried, and — on one Akasaka hillside — permanently associated with a legend about a face that refuses to be one.
Visiting Respectfully
Both spots are straightforward, entirely legal outings. The slope is a normal public street in Motoakasaka, easily reached from Akasaka-mitsuke or Yotsuya, and there is no need to loiter after dark or wander off the pavement to “feel” anything — the history does the work on its own. Zoshigaya Cemetery is a working cemetery with families visiting their own relatives, so keep voices down, stay on the paths between plots, and treat it as the residential space it is rather than a photo backdrop. If you do find Hearn’s grave, a small offering left quietly, in the manner of the one I found there, seems to be the local custom. And if a hundred-year-old ghost story about a faceless woman on a moat-side slope crosses your mind up there after dusk — well, so much the better. That, more than any real haunting, is exactly what Hearn hoped his readers would carry away.
Note: images accompanying this article are illustrative stock photos and do not necessarily show the specific site discussed.
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