G'day Tale Tellers and fans of Japanese True Crime! 👋
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New episode is live right now — and this one hit differently while I was writing it.
Tonight we're going to a mountain village in Japan called Kaio [KAH-ee-oh].
On the night of the 20th of May, 1938, a twenty-one-year-old man named Mutsuo Toi [MOOT-soo-oh TOH-ee] walked through that village with a rifle, two shotguns, and a sword...
He had a torch strapped to his head.
So that the people he was coming for could see his face.
In ninety minutes, he killed thirty people. Then he walked to a hillside at the edge of the village, sat down, and cut his own throat.
He left a note.
The note explained everything...
And that — more than anything else — is what makes this case so deeply unsettling. Because Mutsuo Toi wasn't chaotic. He wasn't random. He had a list, and the village that had known him his entire life was on it.
Todays episode of crime and myth covers the following:
🔍 The full true crime story — a tuberculosis diagnosis, social exile, a diary that tracked his descent in chilling detail, and ninety minutes that ended thirty lives
🏚️ What happened to Kaio after that night — the emptying, the silence, the overgrown cemetery that almost nobody visits anymore
👁️ The witness accounts from the mountain roads near the site — the ones that don't have easy explanations
💀 The Gashadokuro [GAH-shah-doh-KOO-roh] — the ancient Japanese creature born specifically from mass death and the silence that follows it — and why this case fits that mythology in a way that genuinely unsettled me while writing it
The first part of the episode is free to listen to below — you'll hear the cold open and Act One, which sets the scene and takes you into the world Mutsuo Toi was born into.
One last thing before you listen...
The old stories say the Gashadokuro is born not just from the dead, but from the silence afterward. From the failure of the living to acknowledge what happened.
Kaio has been silent for a long time.
Stay curious. Stay a little scared.
— THE TALE TELLER
SOURCES & FURTHER READING:
Tsuyama Massacre — Okayama Prefecture historical records (1938).
Toi, M. — Personal diary and farewell note, examined in Japanese criminology literature.
Kwaidan (Hearn, L., 1904) — Classic English-language source on Japanese folklore including Gashadokuro traditions.
Foster, M. — The Book of Yokai (2015) — Comprehensive academic study of Japanese supernatural creatures.
Reider, N. — Japanese Demon Lore (2010) — Gashadokuro origin traditions.
Okayama local history archives — Kaio village records (partial).
