Free Story Friday: Kunekune – A Creepy Short Story Inspired by Japanese Folklore
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| The KuneKune |
Her house sat low to the ground, wood darkened by decades of rain. Past the house, the paddies spread to the tree line like green mirrors, each field stitched to the next with raised dikes you could walk if you had balance and didn’t mind dragonflies bumping your shins. Beyond them stood a red shrine gate and a crooked scarecrow hunched under its slumped hat.
I saw it on the third day.
At first, I thought the scarecrow had moved. Same pale length, same white suggestion of a body. But the hat was in the wrong place. This shape stood farther out, near the center of a paddy, thin as a fence post and white as laundry in the sun. It swayed—not with the wind. The rice bent, the white thing didn’t.
I told myself it was cloth on a high pole. Heat haze wobbled the road when I looked too long. I blinked, squinted, looked away, and back. Still there. Still swaying, as if it breathed.
By the time I turned down my grandmother’s lane, something in my chest had changed. Not fear, not yet. More like the sensation at a crosswalk when a car you thought was parked suddenly inches forward. A breath you hold without meaning to.
Inside, the cool hit me like a blessing. My grandmother shuffled in socks across the tatami, hair in a neat bun that hadn’t moved since 1968. She nodded at me the way she nodded at everything that didn’t surprise her. The kettle clicked off. Tea hissed into cups.
“I walked to the shrine,” I said. “There’s… I think someone left cloth on a pole in the middle of the field.”
She pushed a cup toward me. “Best not to look,” she said.
Light words, like telling me not to pick at a scab. But her eyes stayed down.
“I didn’t go close,” I said.
“Mm. You must be hungry.”
I waited for the explanation, the joke. She gave me neither.
“Grandma,” I said.
She reached across the table, her papery hand cool on mine. “I know you are curious,” she said softly. “But do not look. Do not speak of it beyond these walls. Make it as though you do not see. What seeks the eye will claim it.”
I told myself it was a riddle. I burned my tongue on tea, grateful for the small pain that anchored me back to the ordinary.
That night, I dreamed I stood on a dike, unable to move. Something white swayed at the far end, and I was furious with my own body for swaying in time with it. I woke with the fan rattling and a strip of moon on the tatami like a misplaced blade.
In the morning, my cousin Aya arrived with plums. She lived two houses down and floated in a constant state of mild alarm, like a bird that had forgotten what it was worried about.
“You look tired,” she said. “Grandma will probably say you need miso or something.”
“She said not to look at the cloth in the field.”
Aya set the plums down. “She says that—she always says that. But… please don’t look at it, okay?”
“Do you know what it is?”
She pressed her lips together. “A thing. Just… a thing. The old men say there’s always been something that stands far away and waves. My father says when you were small, you’d stare at dust in the sun and go quiet for way too long. You’ve always been… you know, open. You should probably… just, I don’t know, shut that, okay?”
I wanted to laugh. Or be offended. Instead I nodded. Some pacts you make because it costs you nothing and makes someone you love unclench their jaw. I would not look. Or, rather, I would not admit to looking.
At noon, the heat polished the fields to a dull glow. Grandma set a saucer of salt by the door—“just to have it handy.” Aya taught me to fold paper cranes. Cicadas sang like electrical lines going bad.
In the afternoon, I walked again. I didn’t look.
I looked.
Far out, beyond the split bridge, the white thing swayed. The distance made it seem harmless. I tried to let my gaze slide over it, the way you ignore a text you don’t want to answer.
It felt me anyway. That’s what it felt like—a catch in the air.
I turned back. I did not run. The back of my neck prickled as if someone stood behind me with a raised hand.
At dinner, the salt dish by the door bore a faint ring, as if something had been set there and lifted away.
“I didn’t look,” I told Grandma. “Not really.”
She didn’t ask what “really” meant. “Tomorrow, stay in during the sun hours,” she said.
Aya came later with playing cards and stories—of a boy who fell into the canal and swore something white bent to see him, of a girl who cut through the fields at night and came home swaying like a reed and never stopped. None of the stories ended. They trailed off, as if telling too much might be an invitation.
I slept badly. The house made its usual noises. And others—sounds that felt like someone learning the rooms by touch. Every time I opened my eyes, I half expected to see white behind the screen.
The next morning, the sky was the color of paper. Storm coming, the old men said. They never looked at the fields.
Grandma sent me to the well. The path ran beside the paddies. The white thing stood in another field today, nearer. Not close. Near enough for detail: a paleness that refused shadow, the impression of a body without joints.
“Don’t,” I said out loud.
“Don’t what?” Aya called from the lane above, balancing a laundry basket too big for her arms.
“Nothing,” I said. “Talking to the bucket.”
We both looked at the bucket. Then away.
“I had a dream,” Aya said quickly. “The white was in it. But dreams don’t open doors, right? Only eyes can.”
“Who told you that?”
“My father,” she said. “He has this very serious voice he uses when he’s pretending it’s a joke.”
By afternoon, the storm forgot to happen. I tried to read, but words slid off the page. I tried to live small, the kind of animal a predator ignores.
At three, I made the mistake of glancing out the window. The white was nearer again. Not in the next field but the one after that. My head filled with cicadas until I couldn’t separate sound from pressure.
I shut the window. All of them.
“Hot,” Grandma said, but she didn’t move to open anything. She sat like a stone where it was meant to be.
“Grandma,” I said, throat raw. “If I look, what happens?”
This time, she answered. “You will see it. And afterward it will know the shape of you. Some people are fine. Some people sway. Some laugh, because laughter is the last thing the body knows how to do when it cannot say ‘no more.’ It is not a god that curses. It is a door that opens when someone looks too long and leaves their gaze behind.”
That night, I broke. Call it curiosity or arrogance. I walked out onto the path because what we had between us had gotten too tight to breathe in.
Up close, it wasn’t tall. It was tall and not tall, long and not long, a length of white that resisted idea. The air smelled like scalded sheets. My mouth watere,d and I swallowed pain.
I opened my mouth to say hello. The exact wrong time to be polite.
“Hello,” I said.
It stopped swaying.
The cicadas did not. The white reoriented the world until it faced me. The ground rang inside my skull. The distance shrank—there, then breath-close, then inside my breath.
Hands seized my shoulders. Aya’s voice rushed: “Close your eyes, close them, close them—please, please just close them,” over and over like a spell. I obeyed.
When I opened them, the white stood back at the horizon, swaying slowly.
Inside, Grandma placed salt dishes at every corner of the room. “You looked,” she said. Not angry. Just tired.
“I said hello.”
“Oh,” she sighed. “That is also looking.”
After that, time blurred. Rain came. People visited. I “improved.” That was the word they used. I did not say goodbye to the fields.
Back home, the heat was American and brief. I told no one.
Sometimes, at the sink, I swayed. A small, private motion. At first, I laughed. Late,r I didn’t.
Last week, a storm came. A strip of white caught on the tree outside my window. Cloth, I told myself. Plastic. The way it moved—no. I shut my eyes and rehearsed my small life: kettle, button, show, sheet.
You are reading this because the story makes a better box than silence. If a summer afternoon turns too bright, if you see something white standing in the field and swaying as if it has all the time in the world—
Don’t look. Not in the way that counts. Count your breaths. Name five things in your pocket. Say hello to dogs and neighbors, not to this. Some greetings are taxes. Don’t pay them.
I’ve gotten good at not seeing with my eyes. The other day, I watched a boy on the corner sway side to side in a way I recognized. I wanted to tell him to sit still until the air forgot him. I didn’t.
It is late now. The fan hums. The tree outside lifts and lowers its leaves like breath. A bag, I tell myself. Laundry. Memory. It is a skill, this convincing.
Salt sits in a saucer by my door. No one asks why.
I won’t look. I won’t greet what is patient.
I will not.
© 2025 Karen Cody. All rights reserved.
This original story was written exclusively for the Urban Legends, Mystery, and Myth blog.
Do not copy, repost, or reproduce without permission.
This tale may appear in a future special collection.
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