Sunekosuri

◆ The legend

A yokai from Okayama Prefecture. You're walking alone on a rainy night when something presses up against your feet and slips through between your shins, brushing them as it goes. That, so the stories say, is the sunekosuri. It's described as looking something like a dog, but this all happens on a dark, wet night, so perhaps few people ever got a proper look at it.

When a sunekosuri winds around your legs, it's said your feet get tangled and walking becomes hard. Yet there are hardly any tales of it biting or hurting anyone. Something soft brushes past your wet ankles out of nowhere, and you shiver and want to laugh at the same time. It's as if that very feeling were given a name: a yokai you can't quite bring yourself to dislike.