Translating Japanese horror.
Kowabana (A shortened version of the Japanese phrase kowai hanashi, which means 'scary story') is a podcast dedicated to telling Japanese urban legends, scary stories, and creepypasta. It is translated, narrated, and produced by Tara Devlin.
Earlier episodes ran for a half-hour, but newer ones run about forty-five minutes. Each features one to six kowai hanashis, usually dealing with the supernatural. Devlin collects stories from around the internet, most of them originating in some form on the occult forum of the popular text board 2chan, which has been a haven for Asian users to share stories of supernatural occurrences and strange happenings since 1999. True to the form of creepypasta, each tale is very short and concise, with the longest ones only running for around twenty minutes or so (with the exception of long specials).
The website Devlin uses to translate stories debuted in July 2017, with the actual podcast coming in November of that year.
Vist the website here.
The podcast is also available on YouTube and Spotify.
Stories on this podcast provide examples of:
- Bolivian Army Ending: At the end of "Hasshaku-Sama," the narrator notes a statue containing the titular evil spirit is broken....giving it potential access to his home. But surely there's nothing to worry about, ''right?''
- Dead All Along: In "If you're going to kill yourself, sleep with me first," the unnamed young man is revealed to be a ghost who committed suicide, and he's trying to stop the woman from sharing his fate.
- Demonic Possession: The protagonist's friend in "Kitsune Posession" is possessed by a Kitsune, although he doesn't realize it until after it's exorcised from him.
- Drugs Are Bad: The protagonist of "Aren't I Great?" is possessed by a demon that takes away her ability to drink alcohol. After it leaves, she can never drink again, much to her annoyance.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Since most of the podcast's stories are taken from anonymous message boards, the titles of the stories are very concise, usually using either the name of the antagonist ("Hasshaku-sama"), the name of a location in the story ("Suspension Bridge"), an exact descriptor of the story's events ("Strange Happening at the Abandoned Hospital") or even just a list of the plot points ("Shrine, Sacred Tree, Kitsune").
- Forbidden Zone: The office workers in "He Went Missing After That Email" are forbidden from entering the strange door in the storage room.
- Ghostly Goals: Both friendly and hostile ghosts appear, given that they're staples of Japanese supernatural stories. Malevolent ones appear a bit more frequently, since the podcast is focused on horror.
- Humanoid Abomination: Kunekune, best described as an undulating, vaguely humanoid thing that is so terrible that seeing it up close drives people insane.
- The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday: A group of boy scouts in "Two Shrines" stumble across two shrines on opposite sides of a mountain path when their map says there should only be one.
- No Ending: Since most of the protagonists of the stories are ordinary people, a great number of them in no way try to figure out what anything that happened to them meant. This leads to a lot of unexplained and inconclusive endings.
- Nothing Is Scarier:
- The protagonist's friend in "He Went Missing After That Email" manages to enter a forbidden room in the office that can only be opened from the inside. He goes missing shortly after and is never heard from again. A coworker tells the protagonist that there is "something" in the room that beckons people inside and that they never come out. Whenever he walked under the room's window he could feel something staring at him through the curtains. He transfers soon after, though, so we never find out what was in that room...
- Something with floating eyes and a crazy laugh attacks the protagonist's friends in a mountain cabin in "Magagami-sama". He flees alone and never sees them again, despite his village's insistence they just moved away and never came back. The only clue is the name 'Magagami,' which Tara Devlin reports means "evil god."
- This is the core of the stories centered around Kunekune. The protagonists of the stories never see the creature clearly, and the other characters who do see it can't describe it because they've been driven mad.
- Questioning Title?: "Aren't I Great?"
- Refuge in Audacity: In "If you're going to kill yourself, sleep with me first," a young man stops a young woman from killing herself by asking her to have sex with him before she dies, with it being such an absurd, bizarre request that it stops her dead in her tracks, and throughout their entire conversation together.
- Salt Solution: In "Hasshaku-sama", the protagonist's grandfather places salt in the corners of the rooms in his house to fend off the titular ghost.
- Snakes Are Sinister: Kankandara, a malevolent entity with the torso of a woman and body of a snake, is the main antagonist of the aptly-named "Kankandara."
- Too Dumb to Live: As a horror podcast, many individuals make several questionable decisions. The one to take the prize however has to be T, the protagonist of "My Friend in the Tape". To whit:
- His childhood friend E died due to the curse of a sarcophagus that E encountered in a mysterious cave. E sends a message from beyond the grave to avoid the cave.
- T's guardian spirits send a warning not to approach the cave through a psychic who was once T's classmate.
- Ominous portents and outright supernatural phenomena pop up to dissuade T from going to the cursed cave.
- T goes anyway and while it looks like his guardian spirits were strong enough to prevent his immediate death, the story implies that he is still doomed to an imminent demise.
- Will-o'-the-Wisp: The protagonist of "The Mountain Pass Onibi" and her husband are terrorized by floating blue lights as they travel through the mountains.
