Nebutori

The nebutori — "sleep-swollen" — is a woman who swells enormously while she sleeps.

The 1841 picture-book has her grown so large that she no longer fits in the room, with thunderous snoring coming out of her.

By day, presumably, she's an ordinary person. The yokai only exists while she's asleep.

And I'm going to be straight with you about what this is, because dressing it up would be worse.

It's a joke about somebody's wife

That's the primary reading and it's the one the record leads with: a warning against "lazy wives who sleep too much after marriage."

It has a sibling, and once you see the pair the whole wing comes into focus.

There's another famous monster — a woman with a second mouth in the back of her head, hidden under the hair, which screams for food and eats twice what she does. Her stated origin is a husband who took a wife because she didn't eat, and was cheap to keep.

So the tradition produced, in the same period:

- the wife who eats nothing — and turns out to be eating everything - the wife who does nothing — and turns out to be enormous

Both are the same joke from the same chair. A husband's-eye grotesque, drawn for other husbands, sold in a picture-book.

There's a whole shelf of this in Japanese monster literature, and it's more honest to name it than to pretend these are folk beliefs from the mists of time.

And then the record tries four ways to explain it

What makes the nebutori worth an entry is that the accumulated commentary is preserved, and you can watch people reaching for anything other than "it's a mean cartoon."

One: it's a moral lesson. The satire reading. The one above.

Two: it's a medical condition. A genuine attempt at diagnosis — a disorder affecting sedentary people who eat well and sleep a great deal. The tradition trying to find a body for its own metaphor.

Three: it's a tanuki. Specifically, tanuki infiltrating the bodies of sleeping women.

That's the tradition's universal solvent. Whenever something can't be explained, a shapeshifting animal did it. It explains the fox-possessed daughter, the haunted brewery, the lights on the mountain, and — apparently — this.

Four: it's a pun. The folklorist Tada proposed a link to Aomori's Nebuta festival, whose floats are themselves colossal, swollen, illuminated figures paraded through the streets.

The fourth one gives the game away

Because there's a regional detail that clicks into place next to it.

In Ōshū — Aomori and Iwate — "nebutori" was live dialect. A real word that real people used, for women who slept badly and slept long.

So follow the actual sequence.

A word existed first. A local, slightly unkind term for a woman with a sleep problem.

An 1841 picture-book gave the word a body — drew it, made it a creature, put it in a monster catalogue.

And then commentators spent the next two centuries handing that creature biographies it never had. A moral. A diagnosis. A possessing animal. A festival etymology.

Four explanations, competing, for something that started as an insult.

Which is the useful thing here

The nebutori tells you nothing whatsoever about sleeping women.

It tells you a great deal about who was doing the describing — and about how fast a bit of local nastiness can acquire the dignity of folklore once somebody draws it well.

There are ghosts in this collection made out of genuine grief, and they are worth your time. This wing is made out of marriage complaints, and the respectful thing to do is say so and move on.

Though I'll note the artist knew exactly what the joke was. The composition puts the humour in the architecture failing — the walls, the ceiling, the room that can't accommodate her.

Which is at least aiming at the house rather than the woman. Small mercy, but it's there.