The category
Most of the night parade has bodies. This page collects the members that don't: yokai that are events — a sound, a touch, a gap, a state — where the being is the happening, and no morning inspection ever finds a body, a stump, or a stone.
The taxonomy of happenings
Sounds without sources.
- The tengu-daoshi: a full logging sequence — axe, groan, crash — and an intact forest at dawn. "An event that unhappens by morning"; Sakurai's reading files it as what a nervous system does with a silence too big to trust.
- The azukiarai's wash-rhythm at the stream — with the azukibabaa as the answer six provinces gave to "what's making it?"
- The warai-onna's laughter, which recruits the landscape into agreeing with it.
- The uwan — a shout with no shouter, audible in one Aomori account only to the two men it was aimed at. The category's purest case: the yokai is its own name, and the catalogue plate (hands up, mouth open, mid-yell) is a body invented to carry a noise — what a sound looks like when a painter is asked to draw one.
- The yamabiko — the echo, where the word names the spirit and the phenomenon with no seam between them. And the echo is contested territory: the kodama claims it for trees, the yamabiko for the mountain, the tengu's disembodied laughter from above. Sound without a source is the most colonised niche in the tradition — because in steep forested country it is the commonest supernatural experience there is, it happens to everyone, and it obligingly repeats whenever anybody tests it.
Contact without a toucher.
- The betobeto-san's footsteps, dismissed with "after you" — the category's comic-tender pole.
- The sodehiki-kozō's sleeve tug — the category's grief note.
Weather that negotiates.
- The yaroka-mizu: the flood that asks permission — protocol-doctrine with a body count in the death registers (1650, 1687, 1873).
- The tengutsubute: stones raining "yet none found on the ground at his feet."
States promoted to beings.
- Kanashibari (the paralysis), buruburu (the shiver), ōmagatoki (the hour), enenra (the shape smoke almost makes) — Sekien's and the tradition's "personified almosts."
Absence itself.
- Kamikakushi — the general theory of gaps: the vanished as taken, the village's job to call them back. With the sounds, sights, and deaths covered above, the events complete a whole folk phenomenology.
What the events teach
The event-yokai are the tradition with its mask off: no costume, no biography, just the raw perceptions — night sounds, skin-prickle, lost time — that the whole bestiary exists to clothe. Strip a picture-yokai of its accreted biography, and what remains is usually an entry on this page.
Which yields the smallest workable definition the bestiary has found: a yokai is an unexplained moment, personified. The sunakake-babaa is the limit case — sand falls from shrine trees, the thrower is never seen in any account, and she is recorded as an old woman on the strength of the name alone. One event, plus a grandmother-shaped noun.
The large ones simply have more accumulated on top.