Tono is the setting of Yanagita Kunio's 'Legends of Tono,' published in 1910 — a collection of folktales gathered from local residents that has been called Japan's most important work of folklore. Kappa, ghosts, the spirits of the dead returning, the marginal presences that inhabit the spaces between human settlements: all of these are documented here as things that people in Tono reported encountering in the early twentieth century. Staying in a Tono farmhouse, particularly one of the L-shaped magariya buildings where horses were traditionally housed under the same roof as the family, is a way of inhabiting the landscape that produced these stories. The basin is surrounded by mountains. The nights are genuinely dark. The agricultural rhythm that structured Tono life for centuries is still visible in the farms that participate in the homestay program. You do not need to believe in kappa to find Tono atmospheric. The folktales work on you regardless of your metaphysics — they are too specific, too rooted in particular bends of particular rivers, to function as pure abstraction. Staying in the landscape they describe, and then reading them afterward, or reading them first and then arriving in the landscape, produces the same effect: a sense that the border between the ordinary world and something adjacent to it is more permeable here than in most places.