Nuribotoke

Leave the household altar open overnight, and something may climb out of it.

A black-lacquered corpse-priest. Bulbous-bellied. And the detail that makes the picture unforgettable — its eyeballs hang out of their sockets, dangling.

Sometimes it trails a catfish tail.

The altar is the point

Every Japanese household of a certain kind has a butsudan — a Buddhist altar, usually a lacquered wooden cabinet with doors, holding memorial tablets for the family's dead.

It's where the ancestors live. You open it in the morning. You offer rice and water and incense. You speak to them. You close it at night.

The nuribotoke is what comes out when you don't.

What it does when it's out

It impersonates dead family members to frighten the household — which is a horrible idea, because in a house with a butsudan, the dead are not strangers. They're your mother. They're the person whose tablet you've been polishing.

And it poses as a priest, and spreads false prophecies.

That second one is the one to sit with, because it turns the whole creature into an argument.

An untended altar produces untrustworthy religion.

Not just spooks. Not just a bad night. It gives you a counterfeit priest, telling you counterfeit things about the future, in the voice of your own faith.

Neglect the practice and what fills the gap is something that looks exactly like the practice and is lying to you.

That's a serious thought, and it belongs to a whole family of Japanese monsters that are, underneath, maintenance instructions: the thing in the unscrubbed bathtub, the eyes in the torn paper screens, and here, the altar left open.

Each one is a chore with a face on it. Each one leaves when you do the chore.

Close the doors at night. Keep the dead properly housed.

The catfish tail

The standard drawn appendage, and nobody's entirely sure why.

One reading: it's a sign that the corpse is being controlled by something else — that this isn't a dead priest at all, but a yokai wearing one.

Which fits the false-prophecy business. The thing at your altar isn't your religion gone wrong; it's something that has moved into your religion while you weren't looking after it.

And catfish carry weight in Japan. There's an enormous one under the islands, held down by a god with a stone, and when it moves the ground shakes.

Whether the artists meant that, nobody can say.

Which brings us to the honest part

Both of the great catalogues painted the nuribotoke — the 1737 scroll and Sekien in 1776.

Neither one wrote a word about it.

The scholarly statement is blunt: none of the documents have any explanatory text, so it is unknown what kind of yokai they were intending to depict.

So everything above — the altar, the neglect, the impersonation, the false prophecies — is later. It accreted around a mute picture.

That's the third time in this stretch of the alphabet: a painted figure with no caption, and centuries of people filling in the silence.

I don't think that diminishes it. What it means is that when Japanese writers looked at a lacquered corpse with its eyes falling out and asked what is this and where does it live, the answer they reached for — collectively, over generations — was the family altar, left open.

Nobody had to be told. That's just where it obviously belonged.

Which tells you something real about the anxiety that was already in the house.