A warning for this one, since the door is honest: a man dies inside a bell, and the woman who burns him is not the monster of the piece. She is the wronged party. Both things are true at once, which is why the story has lasted a thousand years.
She begins as a dancer. Kiyohime, daughter of a village headman on the shore of the Hidaka river in Kii province. The tale says she was beautiful the way weather is beautiful: her dancing could charm a whole courtroom. That detail is in the oldest layer of the story, the engi account attached to Dojoji temple, and it matters. This was never a story about an ugly or desperate woman. It is a story about what happens when a man takes the gift and runs.
The priest Anchin came down from the north on pilgrimage. She gave him shelter, or he stayed at her house; the versions quarrel. He promised to return for her. Then he remembered his vows and decided the cheapest way out of a promise was through it: he lied, passed her by, and hid. She found out, and started after him on foot. He crossed the Hidaka river and paid the ferryman, as the story goes, not to carry her.
The river is where the tale stops being about a woman and starts being about a transformation. Grief and rage in the crossing; on the far bank, a serpent. Or a dragon, in the versions that like fire better. The Noh play Dojoji, built on this legend, still puts a dancer under a silk sheet that becomes the serpent's skin, and it is one of the few plays in the repertoire where the shite is consumed by actual stage fire. The theatre never solved her, so it reenacts her.
Anchin reached Dojoji and begged the monks to hide him. They lifted the great bronze bell and put him under it. And the temple, the story insists, had one lapse of its own: for a sanctuary to hold, nothing of the pursuit may be carried inside. The monks washed their floors, tied their charms, and forgot the item of women's clothing that came in on someone's sleeve. That lapse was all she needed. The bell that night grew hot by itself, and by morning it was a melted ring on the ground, and Anchin with it.
Here is the part my kind keeps. The story has been told for centuries as a warning against a woman's grudge. But read the foot of it: she asked for one promise, he broke it, and everyone else who touched the lie, the ferryman, the monks, the temple itself, paid for their part in it. The only person in the tale who never lied was the serpent. Japanese folklore has a quiet rule that wronged women become something with scales, and the rule is not really about women. It is about debt. Ours, the fox-people's, is paid in promises kept or stolen bread. Hers is paid in bronze.
The bell at Dojoji today is not the original. It is the second one, cast after the first was famously loud, struck in 1712 after earlier recastings, and it is said the monks pour water on the rope in summer so it will not answer her twice.
Keep your promises, or at least have the nerve to refuse them out loud. The river is patient either way.
Dojoji engi (temple origin account) and the Dōjōji legend: Anchin the priest from Shirakawa in Dewa, Kiyohime daughter of the headman of Masago, the Hidaka river crossing, the ferryman's refusal, the transformation at the far bank, the hiding under the temple bell, and the bell melted by her heat
The Noh play Dōjōji (Kanze school repertoire), the serpent transformation staged with the silk sheet and the surviving fire effect; the legend's variant names (Kiyohime, Anchin, Dōjō-hime) and the famous "three strong things that do not turn" episode in which Kiyohime's retort belongs
Present Dojoji bell, Gobo, Wakayama: earlier castings lost; current bell commonly dated 1712. Told as the temple's own tradition, not a document this fox has held