Gifu

Welcome back to Writers Read Their Early Shit, conversations with authors and artists about the lopsided pleasures of their pre-developed, over-early, unripe work.

I'm your guide, Jason Emdy, down in the groove in Gifu Rock City, Japan.

My very special guest this episode is a poet, an editor, and the publisher of Brick Magazine.

Her maternal family comes from East Central Alberta by way of Ukraine and Poland, and her paternal family comes from Central Saskatchewan by way of Northern Ireland and Scotland.

I read it to my kids and so on.

So I thought, it doesn't sound like my kind of thing, but I should get around to it.

So But a good friend of mine here in Gifu, a guy from the UK, he'd read it and he said, be careful.

And I said, okay.

Yeah, we are too.

And he says, I'm hitting the Gifu show on Friday.

Oh, cool.

And really hope to see him.

One of the things that was really interesting to me is that we, I had done some research on this myself years ago.

And I, one of the most important articles about the slit mouth woman was a newspaper article from Gifu from the Gifu city, uh, That was written in 1979 and was considered the first ever written documentation or first or second documentation of this legend.

So we had the chance to interview not the author of the article, the journalist, because he's passed away, but his daughter, who was, I think, six years old at the time.

And she's the one who told him about the slit.

So, so it's, and actually in that kind of the Kuchisake Ono, the slip mouth woman is really a, has become a popular culture legend.

She's known throughout Japan, and she now is in video games, anime, whatnot.

But in Gifu City, she's sort of considered a hometown yokai, and they sort of claim an affiliation with her as one of the first places where her legend circulated.

That's really cool.

The tale took its modern form when it was retold and embellished by some school children.

Kids always come up with the best stuff, the creepiest stuff in Gifu.

They added the surgical mask.

So there you go.

It, it was said in a jokey way, so I didn't mind.

Um, but we got a story from Andrew in Gifu, which is in Japan.

Wow.

What's, let's-

Thankfully, he found the humor in the situation.

For the rest of the trip, he made sure, uh, I, I was there to translate things.

[laughs] "Kind regards, Andrew from Gifu." Um, yeah, Jesus.

[laughs]

Mm-hmm.

On the 13th in Gifu, um, he tag-teamed with, um, with Miles, uh, Zirno, and they lost to Hoshino and Tiger Mask.

Okay.

On the 14th in Nara, he was with, um, Adrian Adonis and Bob Orton Jr. That's Randy's daddy, kids.

It's like, how did they know about this place? Like what, but obviously word gets out that you're, yeah.

And yeah, So, yeah, like, you go to certain parts of Nagano, Gifu, that aren't really popular Japanese travel destinations.

You know, Japanese people would typically go to, say, you know, Disneyland.

Right, right.

So very similar to what Baba used to do.

I have seen him do that at a few events, little ones in Gifu, etc.

And he asked where we were from in English.

He does speak a little bit of English.

Their lord was weak, ineffectual, and unconcerned with good governance, so in many cases this worked.

Hideyoshi seemed to really earn his stripes though at the siege of Inabayama Castle, which would eventually be renamed Gifu Castle.

He suggested building a fortress nearby and then was given charge of it.

And when it came time to storm Inabayama, after talking to local peasants, he devised a way to sneak in a small force.

The problem was Nobutaka's strongest ally was on the wrong side of a snowed-in mountain pass and couldn't come to help.

A quick march by Hideyoshi, maybe this was becoming his trademark, surprised Nobutaka to the point that he immediately surrendered.

He was magnanimously allowed to keep his life and even his castle at Gifu.

His snowed-in ally, Shibata Katsue, was still ready to fight Hideyoshi for control, as were several others.