Jikininki

The jikininki eats corpses, and it knows.

That's the whole difference between this creature and every other corpse-taker in the tradition. There's a demon elsewhere in this collection — the burning cart — that comes to funerals to snatch the wicked dead, and it's doing a job. It has no opinion about the work.

The jikininki is a punishment being served, by someone who is conscious for every minute of it.

They were greedy, or selfish, or impious in life. And they were cursed after death to seek out and eat human corpses — aware the whole time of what they are, ashamed the whole time, and unable to stop.

Appetite as damnation, with the lights left on.

The story

The version everyone knows comes from Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan, and it's one of the best things in that book.

A priest named Musō is caught out after dark in the mountains and asks a hermit for lodging. He's refused — firmly — and directed down to a village instead, where he finds the household keeping vigil over a body.

He's told that the villagers always leave the house on a night like this, and that he should not stay.

He stays.

In the night something comes in. Hearn describes it only as a shapeless entity, and it eats the corpse — and the funeral offerings with it — and goes.

In the morning Musō climbs back to the hermitage and asks about it.

And the hermit confesses. He is that thing.

He had been a priest, in that district, and he had performed the rites — the funerals, the memorials, all of it — solely for the payment. No belief in it, no care for the dead he was burying, just the fees.

And his sentence is exact: he is now compelled to eat the corpses of the very people he once buried for money. The district he served, feeding him, one body at a time.

The way out

Musō performs the segaki for him — the rite of feeding the hungry ghosts — and he is released.

And segaki is not a story device. It's a real Buddhist observance, still performed in Japan, folded into the summer Obon period: food set out and merit directed toward the beings whose hunger can never be satisfied, on the reasoning that being hungry is claim enough regardless of how you got that way.

Which gives this story its shape, and it's the shape a lot of Japanese supernatural material has. The damnation is absolute — he cannot stop, cannot die, cannot repent his way out of it, and has been at it for a long time.

And there is a liturgical exit. Somebody else, unrelated to him, who owes him nothing, performs a standard ceremony, and it ends.

Nobody is beyond the rite. That's the doctrine, and it's the same one running under the ghosts who linger because their funeral was done carelessly and settle the moment it's done properly.

One thing to notice about the punishment

The tradition could have made him hungry forever, or made him hideous, or sent him to a hell with cauldrons.

Instead it made him do the job he took money for, permanently, at the level of the body rather than the ceremony.

He handled the dead of that district for pay. Now he handles them for nothing, with his teeth, and cannot resign.