Aobōzu

The aobōzu is the best argument in this whole collection that there is no such thing as "Japanese folklore" — only a few thousand local folklores that happen to share some vocabulary.

Here is one name, aobōzu, the blue monk. And here is what it means, depending entirely on which province you're standing in.

In Shizuoka, he waits in the wheat fields on spring evenings and takes children. The wheat is high, the light is going, and something is standing out there among the stalks.

In Kagawa, he accosts women on the road. If you ignore him he turns violent. That's the whole of it — an encounter, not a story.

In Yamagata and Fukushima, he is a blue priest's face that comes up out of the school toilet. Which is worth noting, because it means the school-toilet ghost — the niche now completely owned by Hanako-san — was already occupied, decades before her, by a monk.

In Yamaguchi, and this is the good one, he is a mountain god who takes the form of a small priest and challenges people on the road to sumo. Not a riddle, not a curse. He wants a match.

And in various places, he is not a monk at all. He's a weasel, or a tanuki, in disguise, doing what those animals reliably do in Japanese folk belief, which is bother travelers for entertainment.

One word, five creatures

There is no way to reconcile those. A child-snatcher in a wheat field and a wrestling-mad mountain god are not variants of one another; they're different beings that ended up sharing a label.

And that's the normal condition. Japanese folklore is a map, not a canon. Categories that look tidy in a modern encyclopedia — one name, one creature, one description — are usually an artifact of somebody in the twentieth century tidying up. On the ground, a name traveled, attached itself to whatever local apparition needed a word, and drifted.

The aobōzu is that process made visible in a single entry. Five completely different things, one name, one country.

What "blue" is doing

The name has a second reading that's more interesting than the color.

Ao means blue. It also means unripe — green in the sense of unready, immature, not finished. Japanese uses it that way constantly.

Which supports a reading of the aobōzu as an insufficiently trained priest. Not a demon, not a god: a novice who never completed his training, stuck at half-a-monk, wandering around in the fields and the toilets and the mountain roads doing an incompetent impression of a holy man.

That would explain a great deal about the family. The aonyōbō, the court lady rotting in an abandoned mansion, carries the same ao — the never-ripened, the one who never got to be the finished thing.

Sekien drew an aobōzu in 1776: a one-eyed monk beside a thatched hut, with no text at all to say who he was. Scholars still argue about whether that figure is even the same being as any of the five above. Given everything else on this page, that's almost reassuring.