The Classic of Mountain and Seas

paleaswater used to get fantoddy about the folk practices in 100 Demons, like bringing rocks down from the mountains or walking a certain route in the countryside without looking behind you. She said something to the effect of 'these people just didn't think like us.' A daughter of the Revolution might well look askance at something so foreign to her milieu. Cradle Catholic me, who unblinkingly accepted saint's hearts put on display in glass reliquaries and thin wheat wafers that are really and truly, no *really*, the body of a man murdered two millennia ago on the other side of the world, had no difficulty at all with these benign Japanese practices that only fleetingly, if at all, recall bloody dark deeds and obscure beliefs.

(The Japanese used to have human sacrifice. They'd wall someone up in the foundations of a bridge, for instance. And the one story I read about this custom- one of Yumemakura's Seimei stories- had the spirits of the sacrifices making a ruckus to alert the world that the foundation of their bridge was about to collapse. Like, you may not want to be a human sacrifice and you may insist that the wife who informed the authorities that you had the marks needed to be the sacrifice also die with you, but in the end *of course* duty trumps everything. Whatever happened to that Japanese staple, urami? In Ima Ichiko, it's saved for people who starved during famines.)

But the oddity is that the Chinese stories in The Classic fantod me in spades. They recall a dark and primordial world where, yes, people don't think like we do.
( Maybe it's the translation? )