Tenjōkudari

An ugly old woman, long hair hanging wild, upside down, out of the ceiling.

Not falling. Descending partway, and staying — inverted, at lamp height, above your bed.

Tenjōkudari — "the ceiling-descender."

The architecture is the monster

This is the thing to understand, and it explains both of the ceiling yokai at once.

A pre-modern Japanese ceiling was loose boards over a void.

Not a sealed surface. Planks laid across joists, with a dark storage space above — used for whatever the household needed to keep out of the way, and reachable by shifting a board.

Which means that above every sleeper in the house, there was an accessible darkness, separated from the room by nothing more than a plank somebody could move.

You'd hear things up there. Rodents, birds, the boards settling.

And the tradition generated two creatures out of that specific carpentry: one that licks the ceiling from above, and this one — which comes partway through.

Architecture writes monsters. This is the clearest case of it in the collection.

The move is the horror

Compare her to the outdoor version.

There's a creature that drops out of a tree onto travellers — sudden, complete, over in a second.

The tenjōkudari doesn't fall.

She descends partway and stops.

Which is much worse, and for a precise reason: a fall resolves. Something happens and then it has happened. This is a breach held open — the barrier between your room and the dark above it is now partly gone, and she is hanging in the gap, at exactly the height where your lamp still reaches, looking at you upside down, and nothing further occurs.

And she doesn't do anything

That's the record. "No particular harm to humans."

She's a night apparition. She appears. She hangs there. That's the extent of it.

Three readings are on offer:

A harmless apparition — she just is.

A being from the ceiling as an otherworldly space — the void above the boards as a genuine elsewhere, and her as something that lives in it.

Or a pun. In the idiom of the period, "showing the ceiling" meant to trouble someone. Sekien may simply have taken a figure of speech and drawn it, which he did constantly.

There's a cousin, and she's a child

Yamanashi has the tentsurushi — "ceiling-hanging."

A childlike figure, descending at night.

Also harmless.

Whether it's a variant of Sekien's hag or an independent coincidence is debated, and I don't think it's resolvable.

But the fact that the tradition produced this twice, independently, and made it harmless both times, tells you something worth keeping.

The breach is the fear. No payload required.

Nobody needed to add teeth to this.

Something coming partway out of your ceiling and stopping is already the complete idea. Attach an attack and you'd weaken it — you'd give the audience something to be afraid of, which is a smaller thing than being afraid.

Two separate regions worked that out and left her doing nothing.

If you draw it: from the futon, looking up. Hair entering the top of the frame.