Mekurabe

One morning at his new capital of Fukuhara, Taira no Kiyomori — the most powerful man in Japan, the warlord whose family's rise had filled the country's graveyards — looked out into his own courtyard.

It was full of skulls.

Rolling. Turning. Moving left and right, up and down, all across the gravel of his private courtyard, in daylight.

He shouted for his retainers. Nobody came.

Then they assembled

The skulls began to run together.

They flowed into each other and became one skull — and the number the account gives is fourteen or fifteen jō, which is somewhere around forty metres. A skull the height of a fourteen-storey building, standing in his courtyard.

And it was covered in eyes. Countless eyes, all across it, and every one of them was staring at him.

And Kiyomori did not look away

This is the moment.

Everywhere else in this tradition, being looked at by the dead is how you die. There are creatures you survive only by averting your eyes, monsters that kill you by making you look up, women you must not meet the gaze of. The entire folklore of the road is a set of instructions about not looking.

Kiyomori glared back.

He put everything he had into it — the full weight of the man who had beaten every rival in Japan — and he stared the thing down.

And the skull melted like frost in sunlight. Gone. No trace.

He won.

Why that's the most frightening version

Because think about what those skulls were.

They were his. They were the harvest of his wars — every man his clan had put in the ground, come to the courtyard of the house he built with the proceeds, to have a look at him.

And he out-stared them.

He met the accumulated dead of his own career, face to face, at forty metres of face, and he felt nothing — nothing that made him flinch, nothing that made him blink.

The Heike Monogatari, which is where this comes from, knows exactly what it's doing. This isn't a monster scene. It's a portrait of a conscience that will not blink — and it's placed in the text shortly before the fever that kills him, which the Heike describes as a heat so terrible that water poured on him turned to steam.

He wins the staring contest. He loses everything immediately afterwards.

The gaze-rules of this tradition run inverted at the summit of power: where everybody else dies of looking, the tyrant looks straight at his victims and is fine.

Which is the point being made about him.

The name is a joke about the contest

Mekurabe means roughly "eye-contest" — a staring match.

That name isn't from the Heike. It was applied later, by Toriyama Sekien, who catalogued the thing as a yokai in 1781 and gave it the title it carries now. So the scene is medieval and sits in the national epic; the name is an eighteenth-century librarian's label stuck on afterwards.

And then Yoshitoshi painted it — Kiyomori and the Skulls — and made it permanent. It's one of the great images in Japanese printmaking: the courtyard, the snow-white mass of skulls, the small furious man refusing to move.

A footnote worth having

There is a famous giant skeleton in Japanese popular culture — the gashadokuro — that gets described as ancient folklore and demonstrably isn't. It was invented in the 1960s.

Its inventors never mentioned this.

The real medieval giant skull — in the national epic, seven hundred years earlier, dated and attested — was sitting right there the whole time, and the fake walked straight past it.