Kerakera-onna

Over a wall — and higher than the wall — an enormous woman in a kimono leans down and laughs at you.

Kerakera. That's the sound, and that's the name. A cackle.

She doesn't attack. She doesn't follow. She looks over the wall at whoever is passing in the street below, and she finds them funny, and she is far too big.

Sekien's caption reaches for elegance

His 1781 text does something interesting: it dresses the image in Chinese literary clothes.

He invokes the famous beauty of Song Yu's neighbour — the woman whose single smile from the top of a wall was said to have bewitched an entire city.

And then he glosses his giantess as, perhaps, "the spirit of a courtesan who overturned her crimson lips and led many astray."

Which is the entry in one line: a seductive smile, posthumously inflated to the size of the damage it did.

She isn't big because giants are frightening. She's big because that's how much of a man's life a smile from the right window could take, and the picture is rendering the loss at scale.

Same district as the faceless courtesan with the hair, the same accounting of what the pleasure quarter cost people, and the same instinct: the quarter generated monsters about longing, and every one of them is a woman.

She isn't only Sekien's

Worth noting, because it's rare in this stretch of the catalog.

There's a separate print — from a different work entirely — showing a severed woman's head laughing, captioned to the effect of the woman's head laughs kerakera; how dreadful.

Which means the laughing-woman apparition was circulating outside Sekien's invention workshop. He may have refined and literary-fied something that was already in the air rather than manufacturing it whole.

The Tosa region has its own relative too — a laughing woman collected in the field, in Kōchi, with the same vocal signature. The literary one and the field-recorded one, side by side.

The laughter file

There's a small genre here that only becomes visible once you have three members.

The hairy river-imp of Kyushu whose giggle is fatal if you laugh back. The tengu's laughter rolling down an empty mountain. And the kerakera-onna, laughing over a wall at a man in the street.

Laughter without a knowable mouth is its own particular horror, and it's a different thing from a scream. A scream tells you something has gone wrong somewhere. Laughter tells you something is going right, for somebody, and it concerns you.

The modern layer adds that her laugh is audible only to its victim, and that the weak-willed can lose consciousness from the sound. That's post-war embroidery and it should carry its date — but it's a good addition, because it does the one thing that makes this creature worse.

If only you can hear it, then everyone around you is watching a man on a street react to nothing.