Folklore, retold
The story as it is told
A retelling, not a citation. What follows is the story as the most widely circulated popular accounts tell it — folklore encyclopedias, translations, and the versions that have travelled furthest. It is synthesized rather than keyed line by line to the dated primary texts, and popular versions drift from what those texts actually say. The cited, source-by-source record begins further down this page, and where the two disagree, the record wins.
A figure on a night road near Kyoto.
It approaches you — politely, in the popular telling, asking if you have a moment.
And then it drops its clothes, turns around, bends over, and reveals a single eye, shining out of its buttocks.
The record describes the light as "lightning-like."
And then it's gone.
That's it. That's the entire encounter.
Nothing happens to you
No curse. No illness. No fever, no missing time, no bargain, no toll, no thing that follows you home.
You are simply flashed, by something that is not a person, and then you are alone on the road again.
The shirime is the tradition's purest non sequitur — a monster whose entire programme is one anatomical prank.
And all the machinery is present, running on empty
This is what makes it worth more than a laugh.
Look at what the encounter uses.
The night road. The classic setting — the place where the tradition puts everything dangerous.
The approach and the address. Somebody speaks to you in the dark, which is how a great many of these begin.
The reveal. A body turning to show you what it actually is — which is the exact structure of the faceless one, the woman with the second mouth, the demoness at the maple-viewing party.
And the gaze. This tradition is obsessed with looking. Whole classes of monster kill you through your own eyes.
The shirime deploys every piece of the fear-machinery, in the correct order, with the correct timing — and then delivers nothing at all.
It wants to be seen. That's the whole transaction.
Where it actually comes from
The provenance here is unusually specific and unusually thin.
The source is Yosa Buson's *Buson Yōkai Emaki* — a painted scroll.
Buson is one of the greatest haiku poets in Japanese history, second only to Bashō in most reckonings, and also a serious painter.
And he moonlighted as a yokai cataloguer.
His scroll records the being as a variant of the faceless one, called *nuppori-bōzu, appearing at Karakoji in Kyoto*, with "lightning-like eyes attached to the buttocks" instead of a face.
That's the whole attestation. One scroll. No regional variants. No shrine, no village tradition, no consequence.
The now-standard staging — naked, carrying its discarded clothing, politely requesting your attention — comes from Mizuki's twentieth-century retelling. The scroll gives you little beyond the image.
And the name is a pun: shirime (尻目) means a "backward glance" — looking at someone over your shoulder, dismissively.
The joke is that it takes the idiom literally.
Why keep it
Because it's the anchor of the comic register, and that register matters.
There's a persistent temptation to present Japanese folklore as uniformly eerie — all grudges and drowned women and things under the floor. A great deal of it is.
But here is one of the country's greatest poets, in period, in ink, painting a creature whose entire supernatural function is to moon somebody on a dark road.
The tradition laughed at itself. Not later, not in a modern reappraisal — at the time, in a scroll, by a man whose other work is in every anthology of Japanese verse.
If you illustrate it, keep the lightning-render on the eye. That's the joke's one aristocratic touch, and it's the part Buson clearly enjoyed.
Field guide
At a glance
- Behavior
- Stops travelers on the night road, drops its clothes, bends over, and reveals a single lightning-bright eye in its buttocks. Then leaves.
- Powers
- Being seen. That's the whole transaction.
- Weaknesses
- None needed — it does no harm whatsoever.
- Oddities
- Painted by the haiku master Buson in his own yokai scroll — the tradition laughing at itself in period, in ink.
- The name puns on shirime, "backward glance"; the polite accosting is a modern (Mizuki-layer) addition.
Overview
A figure on a night road near Kyoto drops its clothes, bends over, and reveals a single eye shining from its buttocks — "lightning-like." The canonical source is thin and precise: Yosa Buson's *Buson Yōkai Emaki records the being as a nopperabō variant called nuppori-bōzu, appearing at Karakoji in Kyoto, with "lightning-like eyes attached to the buttocks" rather than a face [ja-shirime]. Mizuki's retelling adds the now-standard staging — naked, carrying its discarded clothing [ja-shirime]; the name "shirime" itself puns on shirime* (尻目, "backward glance").
The record
- Provenance: a painter's scroll, not a field collection — Buson the haiku master moonlighting as yokai cataloguer. One attestation, no regional variants, no shrine, no consequence: the victim is merely flashed and the thing is gone.
- The accretion note: the popular version (startled traveler, "do you have a moment?", the reveal) is retold everywhere from the Mizuki layer; the scroll itself gives little more than the image [ja-shirime].
The reading
The tradition's purest non sequitur — a yokai whose entire program is one anatomical prank with no harm, no hunger, no grudge. The tradition's fear-machinery (gaze, curse, protocol) is all present but running on empty: it wants to be seen, that's the whole transaction. File on the authenticity-spectrum beside akateko as underdetermined lore — but where the akateko never acquired a story, the shirime never needed one. In the tradition's comic register this is the anchor: proof it laughed at itself in period, in ink, by one of its greatest poets.
Two-track labeling
The image
Citations
The record
- [ja-shirime]Buson Yōkai Emaki material via ja.wikipedia (nopperabō article's nuppori-bōzu section; retrieved 2026-07-26), Tier C carrying Mizuki.modern reference Japanese Wikipedia's article on this subject, as retrieved in 2026 — often carries regional detail the English article lacks.All-source record
Where the evidence thins
Open questions
- The Buson scroll's provenance and current holder (art-history note; also feeds the-writers page — Buson as yokai artist).
- Whether "shirime" as a name predates Mizuki (check Fujisawa/ Shōwa-era compendia).