Nuppeppō

A wandering lump of flesh.

Roughly person-sized, roughly upright, with a face suggested only in the folds of the fat — not features so much as the idea of features, where the creases happen to fall.

And it smells. The accounts put it somewhere in the region of decomposition.

It turns up in night graveyards and abandoned temples.

It doesn't do anything

That's the entry.

It doesn't attack. It doesn't curse you, follow you, take anything, or want anything. There's no rule to observe and no counter-measure to carry.

It just is something. Unforgettably.

Matter without form. Meat without an animal.

Which is, I'd argue, a more sophisticated piece of horror than most of what's in this collection — because there's nothing to negotiate with and nothing to survive. There's only the fact of it, ambling through a graveyard, being flesh that nobody is using.

All three of the early catalogues painted it — a scroll from around 1700, then 1737, then 1776 — and none of them had much to say.

The name is a dig at somebody

From nupperi — flat, featureless, smooth.

The same root as the faceless one who turns round on the Akasaka road. Edo Japanese had a productive little word-family for facelessness, and the cataloguers gave it two different bodies: one smooth and one saggy.

And there's a sharper edge to it. Nupperi was also used as a jab at women in heavy makeup — the sense being that thick cosmetics produce a kind of drooping, featureless face.

So the blob is partly a cosmetics joke. Which is a reminder that the Edo monster catalogues are not solemn documents. A good half of what's in them is somebody being rude about their neighbours with a paintbrush.

The Ieyasu anecdote

An eighteenth-century account attaches the nuppeppō to a famous incident.

A meat-thing appeared in the grounds of Sunpu Castle during Tokugawa Ieyasu's residence there.

It couldn't be caught. And so, by the shogun's own order, it was driven into the mountains, unharmed.

The founder of a dynasty that ruled Japan for two and a half centuries, personally ruling on the disposal of a blob of flesh — and choosing catch-and-release.

It's the driest comedy in the whole tradition. Nobody investigated it. Nobody consulted a diviner. The most powerful man in the country said take it somewhere else, and that was the end of the matter.

And there's a rumour bolted on that shouldn't be

You'll read that eating its flesh grants eternal youth.

I want to flag that one, because it's exactly the kind of claim that spreads without a source.

The primary sources for it remain unidentified. Nobody has been able to point at where it comes from.

And it looks, structurally, like a graft — imported from two other places. The Chinese taisui lore, about a fungal flesh-mass conferring immortality. And the Japanese ningyo story, where a girl eats mermaid flesh and cannot die for eight hundred years.

Two immortality-flesh traditions, both real, both nearby, both about eating something you shouldn't. And a formless meat-blob sitting between them with no story of its own attached.

The graft is understandable. It's still a graft, and I'd rather say so than pass it on.

Because the un-improved version is better anyway. A thing that shows up in a graveyard, smells appalling, has a face only by accident, and asks nothing of you whatsoever.

It's oddly endearing, drawn. All three early painters seem to have thought so too.