Aonyōbō

A noble house has fallen. The family is gone — ruined, dispersed, dead. The mansion is still standing, but the roof is going and the garden has closed over the path, and nobody has called there in years.

Inside, in one of the rooms, a lady-in-waiting is getting ready.

She is dressed in the layered court robes of a fashion that went out of style decades ago, and the silk is moth-eaten. Her face is painted the formal white. Her natural eyebrows have been shaved off and new ones painted high on the forehead, the way the court required. Her teeth are lacquered black, which was what a woman of standing did.

She is doing all of this for a caller. The caller is not coming. The caller has not been coming for a very long time.

And if you disturb her at it, she eats you.

The horror is the etiquette

That's the aonyōbō, and what makes her land is that nothing about her is supernatural except the fact that she's still there.

Every single element of her appearance was correct. The white face, the raised eyebrows, the blackened teeth, the layered robes — that was simply what a gentlewoman at the Heian court looked like, and getting it right was a serious professional skill. Her title, nyōbō, was a real position with real duties.

The monstrous part is that the world those rules belonged to has rotted away and the rules have not stopped running. She is still preparing. She is preparing correctly, to standard, in an empty house, forever.

Toriyama Sekien put her in a ruined imperial residence when he drew her in 1779, and the setting is doing half the work: the grandest possible architecture, gone to pieces, with the protocol still being observed inside it.

The same "blue"

Her name carries the same odd syllable as the aobōzu, the blue monk, and it works the same way here.

Ao is blue, but it's also unripe — the unready, the never-finished. Read that way she isn't the blue court lady. She's the court lady who never got to ripen: who was in service, in position, on the way to something, when the house underneath her collapsed and left her mid-preparation.

What was actually happening

This one has a very short distance between the folklore and the history.

When a noble house fell in Japan — and they fell regularly, through political disgrace, through war, through simple decline — the women attached to it had nowhere to go. Their entire training, status, and identity existed only in relation to a household that no longer existed. Some were absorbed elsewhere. Many were not. What happened to them was, in the plainest terms, that they became invisible.

The aonyōbō is that outcome with teeth added. Folklore didn't invent the woman still sitting in the ruined house preparing for guests who will never arrive. It found her, and made her dangerous, which is one of the few forms of attention the tradition had left to give.