Kowabana Encyclopedia: Magagami-sama

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Magagami-sama in 60 seconds…

In a certain village somewhere in the countryside of Japan, it’s said you can find a pond. This pond is ridiculously beautiful, and its water so clear it seems to sparkle turquoise in the sun. There are rumours that this pond is actually bottomless, however, or that if you ever find it, you’ll never be able to return. Children of the village are warned never to go near it, but because none of them have ever actually seen it, they don’t know if it even really exists.

But it’s not the beautiful pond that the grown ups in the village are actually trying to keep the children away from. It’s what lurks in the cabin beside the pond. The terrifying Magagami-sama (also referred to by some as Magagami-san)…

Four teens, Ume, Taro, Jiro, and Hanako, head out to find the pond one day, and of course, they manage to stumble upon it without too much effort. Jiro and Hanako head inside, but Ume is forced to remain outside with Taro, who refuses to go in. For good reason. Magagami-sama lurks in there, and it turns out this whole trip was a ruse to get rid of Jiro and Hanako because Taro is sick of being bullied by them.

Ume, being from out of town and simply visiting his grandparents, is more than a little confused when Taro tells him about Magagami-sama, who Taro heard about from Old Lady Kichizu (a lady it turns out may not actually even exist). He breaks into wild laughter, and as Ume rushes into the cabin, he finds the inside pitch black and there’s a strange smell in the air. Like something burning or rotting.

Even worse, he can hear a laugh coming from the other end of the cabin which sounds just like the strange laugh Taro did outside. A little something like “hyoa hyoa hyoa.” It turns out to be Hanako and Jiro. They’ve also lost their minds.

Before Ume is able to leave the cabin to seek help, he notices a pair of eyes floating in front of him. They seem to be milky white, like a membrane is covering them. But that’s it. No body. Nothing else. Just floating eyes. The cabin is also covered in some unknown sticky substance, and as Taro pokes his head in the window, Ume notices his eyes are milky as well now. It would appear that Magagami-sama has possessed them all.

When Ume gets back to town, he’s immediately accosted by Taro and Hanako’s grandfather, who somehow knows where he was. Probably because of the sticky substance still all over him from the cabin, which Ume describes as something like mayonnaise speckled with dots of black and red.

Ume passes out, and when he comes back to, he’s on the floor in his grandmother’s house surrounded by adults from the village. His grandmother asks him to look at her artificial eye (she lost her real one in an accident long ago), but he’s confused because nothing looks different to usual. The adults all sigh in relief and proclaim that he’s okay. He’s safe.

But when Ume asks about his three friends, he’s in for a shock. They claim all three of them are at home, and have been all day. They tell him never to go up that mountain alone again. He quickly cottons on that they’re lying, and he surmises that his friends were locked away because whatever happened at the cabin caused them to lose their sanity.

And in the end, he never sees them again. He hears rumours about them graduating and getting jobs, but how true any of that is remains unknown. He’s also never able to get any further information about Magagami-sama or even the pond, and whoever he asks about it claims that no such pond exists.

What is Magagami-sama? The story doesn’t give us a lot of information. The being only appears as a pair of cloudy, milky eyes in a cabin on a mountain located near a beautifully clear pond. The cabin is coated in a white sticky substance that’s flecked with black and red and apparently smells quite awful. Interacting with Magagami-sama also seems to cause madness, but this isn’t guaranteed. Ume is able to escape with his sanity in tact, but perhaps that’s because his time in Magagami-sama’s presence was so short.

There’s a hint in Magagami-sama’s name as to what they may be. “Maga” can mean something wicked, evil, a disaster, and “gami” comes from kami-sama. An evil god of misfortune, disaster, and calamity. Japanese readers have theorised that the name can be written as 禍神様 in kanji, but at the end of the day, Magagami-sama’s true form is never stated. It’s left up to us to imagine.

If you’re interested, you can watch a Japanese comic (sadly no English subs) that illustrates the story below: