4 ideas
The accounts attach each encounter to a specific person, household, village, or mountain pass, often with a family name or approximate date. This makes them read as local reportage rather than timeless fairy tale. Yanagita presents them as present fact, hoping they will make the people of the flatlands shudder.
The zashiki-warashi is a child spirit living in an old house, and the household prospers while it stays. When it is seen leaving, the family's decline is expected to follow. In one account, two spirit girls leave the Yamaguchi Magozaemon household and most of the family soon dies of mushroom poisoning.
Old people past sixty were sent to live at Dendera-no, a field set apart from the village. They could not simply die there, so they came down by day to work the fields for food and returned at night. The story shows abandonment of the elderly as an ongoing arrangement with the living community rather than a single act of exile.
A man who lost his wife in the 1896 tsunami meets her ghost on the shore at night, walking with a man she had loved before their marriage, who also drowned. She tells him she is now that man's wife. Grief here meets an afterlife that does not honor the living husband's claim, and he later falls ill.