Catalogue the monsters by cause instead of shape, and the bestiary reorganizes into an index of griefs. This page is the still center — deep in the site, deliberately far from the front door.
The mothers. The ubume at the river crossing with her heavy bundle — childbirth death, and the burial customs that tried to manage it. Her kin: the candy-buying kosodate-yūrei, Ehime's snow-borne yukinba, the kokakuchō's stolen children, the ame-onna whose rain is a search. And their guardian: Jizō at the stone piles, his bibs and toys still accumulating — Osorezan's pinwheels turning in the sulfur wind.
The workers. The dorotabō's "return my field"; the noderabō ringing the bell of his failed parish; the kosode-no-te reaching from the sleeve for the ransom that never came; the koto-furunushi's obsoleted music; the kazenbō's incomplete letting-go. Work, debt, craft, vocation — each with its specific residue.
The wronged. The wrath system holds the case law (Oiwa, Kasane, Okiku; Masakado, Michizane, Sutoku); the kijo page holds its pre-history — "what the tradition says happens to a woman's anger when it has nowhere lawful to go."
The hungry. The gaki's needle throats; the jikininki's ashamed appetite; the hidarugami's roadside starvation, answered by every hiker's spared grains; the shichinin-misaki's conserved unrest.
The animals. The bakekujira's skeleton off the whaling coast; the kawauso and the okuri-inu's wolf — folklore outliving its extinct animals; the tesso's rats and teratsutsuki's woodpecker carrying human institutional grief in animal bodies.
The unmourned in general. The yūrei doctrine names the whole category: spirits outside the care system — and Obon is the system, working: the welcomed dead don't haunt.
More rooms in the index. The mothers' shelf has its center and its poles: the kosodate-yūrei entry proper — she spends her ferry-fare coins on candy for the grave-born child, and Minatoya in Higashiyama still sells the sweets — against the yanagi-onna, whose child is in her arms and who has nothing left to do but accuse the willow; the yonaki-ishi does the mourning as geology, at a fixed address. The children's shelf opens: the sodehiki-kozō's tug — a failed "wait, look at me" repeating at dusk forever — and the obo/ubu, the abandoned infant grown into a pursuing spider, defeated only by adoption: one sandal thrown, one sentence — "You are your mother" — of retroactive family. The sankai page holds the birth-room's own doctrine (documentary register: the belief as triage, aiming every hand at the savable life). And Oshira-sama shows grief's other exit — not haunting but industry: the beheaded horse and the ascended daughter returning to teach silk, worshipped in dolls that wear a century of cloth.
The grief of not dying. Every other room in this index holds someone who lost. One holds someone who couldn't. A fisherman's eighteen-year-old daughter in Wakasa ate what was on the table — ningyo flesh — and stopped aging; the Yao Bikuni buried her husbands, then everyone, and at 120, "deeply feeling the impermanence of worldly affairs," took vows and walked the country for the next seven centuries. Immortality here arrives by accident, at dinner: no wish, no bargain, no price agreed in advance — and the tale spends eight hundred years itemizing the bill. Outliving is the one grief that accrues. Her answer is this whole index's ethic in motion: she converts endless time into planted trees and told stories — cedar, pine, and above all camellia — the only two uses of forever the folklore respects. At 800 she went back to Obama and chose her end in the cave, her camellia at its mouth. Paired with Iwanaga-hime, the rejected goddess whose slight made us mortal, she completes the tradition's mortality diptych: why we die, and why we should not wish otherwise.
What the index shows. Strip the masks and the bestiary is a ledger of what a society feared losing and failed to protect — children, mothers, workers, the poor, the wronged, the wild. The monsters are the receipts. And the tradition's answer, everywhere, is the same practical tenderness: feed them, name them, build them a shrine, tell their story right. Which is — Hōichi again — all the dead ever asked.