Night Parade wing
Paths, bridges, processions, travelers, and things met in passing.
80 entries
Field-guide entries
the oil presser
RegionalOn the Kusazumigoe pass in Amakusa, a grandmother tells her grandchildren: "long ago, an abura-sumashi used to appear here" — and a voice answers from the empty pass: "I still do!" That perfectly timed punchline is essentially the entire attested folklore of the abura-sumashi — and it's enough: the yokai as jump-scare with impeccable comedic instincts.
the red hand in the tree
Picture onlyFrom an old honey-locust tree beside an elementary school in Hachinohe (Mutsu/Aomori), disembodied red child's hands emerge.
the hearth-burn scraper of Uwajima
RegionalUwajima, Ehime: the amaburakosagi — named from amabura (Uwajima dialect for the red mottled low-temperature burns of too long an idle winter at the irori) + kosagi (to scrape).
the contrary demon
ChronicleThe amanojaku is pure contrariness with a body: order it, and it does the opposite; it "reads people's hearts and plays pranks in opposition to them."
the thing that tangles your legs
RegionalKagawa's night roads: something wraps around your legs as you walk — "cotton-like" to the touch, never seen, tripping travelers.
long-legs carrying long-arms
RegionalTwo peoples from the Shanhai Jing's far countries — the long-legged (chōkyaku) and long-armed (chōhi) — who fish as one composite machine: "the long-legged person carried the long-armed person on their back, with the latter catching prey" in the surf.
the bean washer
RegionalBy a stream at dusk: shoki...
the changing cat
RegionalThe bakeneko is the house cat under suspicion: one tail (unlike the nekomata's fork), and a repertoire of unsettling domestic behaviors — licking the lamp oil, speaking, dancing with a napkin on its head.
the spirit of the banana plant
ChronicleThe banana plant's spirit, walking as a person — Sekien, Konjaku Hyakki Shūi.
the footsteps behind you
RegionalWalking a dark road, you hear footsteps behind you — beto, beto, beto — matching yours.
the lantern that might be a fox
RegionalA lantern tied to bamboo, tilted over the road, its split seam hanging open like a mouth — Sekien, Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro.
the lantern procession with no procession
RegionalRows of lights where no road is: in Tokushima, "dozens of lantern fires appeared simultaneously, resembling illuminated electric bulbs in a row" — read as supernatural beings out with lanterns; foxes usually blamed.
the muddy field monk
Edo catalogFrom the mud of a neglected rice paddy, at night, rises a one-eyed, three-fingered figure, black with muck, crying "Return my field!
the smoke that takes shape
Edo catalogAbove a bonfire, the smoke stops obeying the wind: it gathers, folds, and takes human shape — a face, a reaching figure, woven of "lightweight-fabric smoke" (the name's literal reading — ra is thin silk gauze).
the old camellia's spirit
RegionalThe camellia drops its flowers whole — the entire head falling at once with a soft weight, not petal by petal.
ox-head and horse-face
ChronicleThe dead don't walk themselves to court.
the barbed woman
RegionalOn the night roads of Ehime: a beautiful woman, hair to the ground, laughing at a young man.
the bridge princess
ChronicleThe Hashihime begins as pathos — in the Kokin Wakashū (c.
the hunger that walks the pass
RegionalOn a mountain pass, a healthy traveler is struck — mid-stride — by hunger so total the legs stop working: "acute hunger, fatigue, and numbness of the limbs...
the one-eyed monk giant
ChronicleThe one-eyed boy's grown-up: a giant monk with a single eye, met on night roads — in some tellings expanding and contracting like the mikoshi-nyūdō, in Kyoto tradition actually a fox's disguise, elsewhere a tanuki's.
the bone woman
Edo catalogShe comes at night to the man she loved, beautiful as she was in life — and only others can see what he holds: bone.
the fishhook that made a dynasty
ChronicleThe missing span in the tradition's sea-court arc: how the imperial line got into the dragon palace.
the flying bolt of cotton
RegionalA bolt of white cotton — one tan, about 10.6 meters by 30 centimeters — fluttering through the dusk, wrapping around a face or throat.
the corpse-eating ghost
RegionalThe jikininki is the corpse-eater who hates being one: "the spirits of greedy, selfish or impious individuals...
the guardian at the river of stones
ChronicleAt the Sai no Kawara — the stony banks of the dead's river — the children who died too soon "are condemned to stack piles of stones, in vain, since the piles are repeatedly toppled by oni" — a Sisyphus built for the smallest.
the woman on the shōji
Edo catalogIn a haunted house, on a moonlit night, the paper screen shows the silhouette of a woman who isn't there — cast by moonlight, with no one standing in it.
the curse of the Kinugawa
Edo catalogKasane was a disfigured woman married for her money by a man named Yoemon, who — revulsion curdling into greed — killed her with a sickle at the edge of the Kinugawa river.
the hair courtesan
Edo catalogYoshiwara, evening.
the Amami tree-child between two worlds
RegionalAmami's spirit-child: child-sized, thin elongated limbs with club-like tips, a monkey-hairy body (red or black), sharp red eyes, pointed mouth, "a yam-like odor" — and a plate on its head containing mystical water or oil.
the shrine's lion-dogs
RegionalAt every shrine gate in Japan, two beasts: one mouth open — "a", the first sound, the beginning — one mouth closed — "un", the last, the end.
the hands from the sleeve
Edo catalogA fine kosode kimono — donated to a temple after its owner's death, per the shinigawa custom of offering the dead's clothes — hangs in the hall.
the headless horse
RegionalThe horse without a head, walking anyway.
the pillow-turner
Edo catalogYou wake and your pillow is on the wrong side — or you are.
the staring contest with the dead
ChronicleOne morning at his new capital of Fukuhara, Taira no Kiyomori — the man whose clan's rise filled Japan's graveyards — looked into his courtyard and found it full of skulls, rolling and turning, left and right, up and down.
the looming monk
Edo catalogOn a night road a monk stands ahead of you — and the higher you look, the taller he grows, until you topple backward, and "one's windpipe would get gnawed at".
the god's advance party, and the dead who joined it
RegionalThe word is the doctrine: mi + saki — "the god's forerunner".
the liver-eater at the funeral
RegionalFrom the Chinese classics: a water-born spirit "resembling a three-year-old child, red-black in color, with red eyes, long ears, and beautiful hair" (Huainanzi) whose appetite is exact — it "delights in eating the livers of the dead" (Bencao Gangmu).
the earthquake catfish
RegionalUnder the islands of Japan, in the mud, lies a catfish the size of the country's misfortune.
the flesh-man who pointed at heaven
RegionalApril 4, 1609, Sunpu Castle — the retired shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu's own grounds: a humanoid "lump of meat, with four limbs but no fingers," standing and pointing to the heavens with its arms.
the faceless one
RegionalA person like any other — until they turn, or wipe a hand across their face, and there is nothing there: "no eyes or nose or mouth," an egg of skin.
the slippery gourd-head
RegionalThe nurarihyon is the clearest case study in fake folklore anywhere in this bestiary: an elongated-headed old man painted in the Edo catalogs with no story attached, who in the 20th century acquired — out of thin air — the title "supreme commander of the yokai."
the lacquered buddha
Edo catalogLeave the household butsudan (Buddhist altar) open overnight, and something may climb out of it: a black-lacquered corpse-priest, bulbous-bellied, its eyeballs dangling from their sockets, sometimes trailing a catfish tail.
the invisible wall
RegionalYou're walking a familiar road at night, and the road stops being there: an invisible wall — too tall to climb, too wide to round — where your path was.
the piggyback rider that pays in gold
RegionalNight, a thicket path near Sanjō (Niigata): something small leaps onto your back shouting its own name, and starts getting heavier.
the cry from the grass
RegionalA name covering the northern mountains' infant-dread, in escalating registers:
when the dead come home properly
RegionalFor a few days each summer, Japan's dead are supposed to be here: welcomed by mukaebi fires, housed at the butsudan, danced for, and sent back by okuribi — Kyoto's mountainsides burning with the great Daimonji characters to light the way home.
the hazy carriage with a face
Edo catalogA hazy night on Kamo's great road; "the sound of a creaking carriage," and then the strange form: a semi-transparent ox-cart whose front panel is one giant face — Sekien, Konjaku Hyakki Shūi.
nothing but blackened teeth
Edo catalogAt dusk, near a shrine, a woman in bridal white stands with her back to you — lovely figure, fine kimono.
the great head
Picture onlyA face — only a face — vast as weather: a married woman's head with blackened teeth (ohaguro) filling the sky, or an old woman's face crammed into a storeroom, sticky to the touch.
the escorting dog
RegionalOn a mountain road after dark, a dog (or wolf) falls in behind you and keeps pace, exactly, all the way.
the hour of meeting demons
Edo catalogNot a creature: a time.
one gulp of the oni
Edo catalogNot a creature but a fate: to be eaten by an oni in a single mouthful — completely, instantly, silently.
the giant monk
RegionalThe parent class of the tradition's monk-shaped giants: the ōnyūdō — "big monk" — a shadow or towering figure met at night, from two meters tall to "as large as mountains".
the lady of Himeji keep
RegionalAt the top of Himeji Castle's great keep lives a lady who does not receive visitors.
the mountain of dread
RegionalThe tradition's doctrines have one place where you can walk into them: Osorezan — Mt.
the giant blind minstrel in the storm
ChronicleA giant blind minstrel — "tattered trousers and wooden clogs, carrying a staff," "wandering the night in wind and rain," claiming he's on his way to the pleasure houses to play shamisen — Sekien, Konjaku Hyakki Shūi (1784).
the monk who became a kappa at customs
RegionalSha Wujing — the sand-river ogre of the Journey to the West, third disciple, azure-faced and fearsome — arrived in Japan and became a kappa.
the horse's head in the hackberry tree
RegionalA horse's head — only the head — hanging from an old roadside hackberry (enoki) in Okayama's Oku district; persimmon or enoki in Kumamoto.
the fish that guards the roofline
RegionalThe composite beast on Japan's castle roofs: fish body, dragon (earlier tiger) head, upright tail, spiked back — and one job.
the diviner's servants
RegionalThe onmyōji's workforce: shikigami — conjured spirits, "some sort of kami, represented by a small ghost" (Inoue Nobutaka's gloss) — invisible servants running espionage, errands, and enforcement on their master's spiritual power, made visible when bound into folded and cut paper effigies.
the boy who pulls your sleeve
RegionalDusk, Saitama, a hurrying traveler: a tug at the sleeve.
the dead, promoted on schedule
RegionalThe system the whole ghost-tradition presumes: the dead undergo "successive rituals, eventually becoming ancestor spirits through an enshrinement ceremony conducted 33 years post-death" — after which they "lose individual identity and merge with the ancestral collective".
the sand-throwing hag
RegionalPassing under the trees by a lonely shrine, sand showers down on you.
the shin-brusher
RegionalOn rainy Okayama nights, something soft and dog-like presses through a walker's legs — brushing the shins, tangling the stride — and does nothing else [wikipedia-sunekosuri, per a 1935 yōkai dictionary].
the flying head under Tokyo
RegionalIn 940 the rebel Taira no Masakado — the eastern warlord who crowned himself "New Emperor" — was killed, beheaded, and displayed in Kyoto.
the torso that runs
Modern inventionA sound in the dark behind you: teke teke teke — elbows on pavement.
the heavenly dog
ChronicleThe tengu is Japan's mountain lord: a Chinese "celestial dog" that arrived as a comet omen, grew wings and a beak, made war on Buddhism, then rose — by way of the mountain-ascetic imagination — into a red-faced, long-nosed demigod who teaches swordsmanship, punishes arrogance, and owns the peaks.
stones from the empty sky
Edo catalogStones fall out of a clear sky — as if thrown, from nowhere findable.
the eyes in the palms
Edo catalogAn old blind man reaches toward you — and opens his hands: an eye stares from each palm.
the tofu boy
Edo catalogA small boy in a bamboo hat, holding out a tray with a single block of tofu stamped with a maple leaf.
the bucket-dropper
RegionalWalk under the wrong ancient tree at dusk and something drops — fast as a well bucket let go: a severed head, a bucket, a ball of fire, laughing as it hauls back up.
the birthing-woman ghost
ChronicleThe ubume is grief folklore at its most direct: the ghost of a woman who died in childbirth, standing at a river crossing or crossroads at night, begging a stranger to hold her baby — a baby that grows heavier and heavier and turns out to be a stone or a bundle of leaves.
the human-scale collection (source anchor)
ChronicleThe setsuwa trilogy's third and warmest shelf: the Uji Shūi Monogatari — "gleanings of Uji" — early 13th century, anonymous, 197 tales in 15 volumes, "from nobles to commoners," from the mundane to the fantastical, and — distinctively — light on sermon: the collection that let its tales be funny.
the horse leg from the branches
ChronicleAt night, from a tree branch — or from the wooden slats of a fence or hedge — hangs a horse's leg.
the shout
Edo catalogIn an old house or ruin, out of nowhere: "UWAN!" — a shout with no shouter.
the child-taker of the night roads
RegionalIn Chichibu and Hiki (Saitama), when a child went missing, the established phrase was ready: "taken by the yadōkai" — or "led away by the hidden zatō" [ja-yadokai, per Murakami 2005, citing Yanagita].
the mountain man
RegionalA huge, hairy, half-naked man of the deep mountains who — this is the tradition's signature — works: carrying loads, stripping bark, helping with farm labor, "in exchange for tobacco or food rather than money".
the woman under the willow
Edo catalogA woman holding a child beneath a willow — Ehon Hyaku Monogatari (1841).
the night-crying stone
RegionalJapan's crying stones split into two working categories:
the night sparrow
RegionalOn a mountain path after dark: chi, chi, chi — a sparrow's chirp where no sparrow should be awake, keeping pace with you.