Look, it’s bad enough that my wife gets cat-called in the street and flashed on the train. There’s a lot of sickos out there who get their jollies by harassing women, and usually I try to shut them down without escalating it to a fight.

But we moved a few months ago to a new place. (I don’t want to say where, but it’s in Ishikawa Prefecture.) Last week my wife went to the toilet one night—we have the traditional kind, rather than a Western-style seat—and a moment later I heard this godawful shriek. I went running, and my wife told me that while she was doing her business, some hand groped her butt. Now, like I said, it was late at night, so I figured she’d felt, I dunno, a spider crawl across her skin or something, or maybe she was just half-asleep and had one of those waking dream hallucination things. There was nobody in the toilet or in the house, so how could a hand have touched her?

Then it happened again, the very next night. Shriek, me barging in, my wife telling the same story. Third night, she wakes me up and insists I go with her to the toilet. She’s convinced something weird is going on, and I want to reassure her, so as a joke, I grab this katana I got in my stupid teenage years.

Yeah, so, long story short, my wife was right. (I’ve already apologized to her for doubting.) A moment after she squats down, this hairy arm somehow comes rising up out of the drain and reaches for her.

So this time I shriek, because what the hell—how is an arm coming out of the toilet? And because I’ve got the katana, I swing it. Which was really stupid, because I could have hit my wife; my sport in high school was soccer, not kendo or tennis, but luck was with me, and I cut the damn hand right off. It drops to the floor—surprisingly little blood—the rest of the arm vanishes, and my wife and I don’t sleep a wink the rest of the night.

Next day, I’m wondering what to do with this hand, when three priests show up. One of them peers past me into the apartment and says, “I sense an evil presence here.” We don’t have one of those places they call “real estate listings with reasons,” you know, where the agent is required to tell you that somebody died there horribly . . . but then again, I just cut the hand off some hairy monster, so you know, maybe something didn’t get disclosed to us like it should have been.

Thinking that priests might be just what we need right now, I invite them in and show them the hand. Second priest says, “Ah, yes, I recognize this as the hand of a kurote. It’s a creature that lives in a toilet.” (First I’ve ever heard of it.) And then the third priest grabs it and yells, “I recognize this as MY hand which you CUT OFF MY ARM!” and there’s this enormous monster with its head hitting the ceiling and all three of them are monsters and then they’re gone, hand and all, and is this what gaslighting feels like? Because I’m really doubting my own sanity, here.

But that’s not all! About two days later, I’m out for a walk in the park—nowhere near a toilet, I might add—when all of a sudden I get yanked up into a tree. Yes, really. I’m not real clear on what happened; it was this whole mess of snarling and me being flipped this way and that until I almost threw up, so I couldn’t see real clearly, but I kinda smelled that toilet smell, like a public bathroom that hasn’t been cleaned recently enough, so I’m pretty sure it was the kurote. Then I got dropped back to the ground, and my wallet was gone, and my phone was gone, and my watch was gone.

Yeah, I got mugged by toilet monsters. Because apparently they hold a grudge. But they started it! Did that thing have to get its jollies by groping my wife in the middle of the night? I’m pretty sure she’s the wronged party here, and I was just doing justice!

AITA?