The Tale of the Hashihime of Uji

22 Apr 2013 8 Comments

by Zack Davisson in Yōkai Stories Tags: , , ,

Toriyama Sekien Hashihime of Uji

Translated from the Heike Monogatari

During the Imperial reign of the Emperor Saga, there lived a courtly lady consumed by jealousy. So powerfully was she in jealousy’s grip that she made a pilgrimage to the shrine at Kifune and cloistered in prayer. For seven days, she devoted herself to a single-minded wish: “Oh great and powerful Kami of Kifune, grant me the powers of a devil while I am still living. Make me a fierce being, terrible to behold. Let my outer form match the flame of jealousy that burns so brightly within. Let me kill.”

That great miracle-working Kami of Kifune understood the depths of her desire, and heeded her call. “I am moved by pity and by the sincerity of your prayer. If you wish to become a living oni, to change into a monstrous form, get thee to the Kawase river in Uji. Perform the ceremony I shall now teach you, and then return to submerge yourself in the waters of the river. Do this for 21 days.” This courtly lady saw and heard the manifestation of this celestial being, and was in rapture.

The woman returned to the capitol city and made her preparations. She found a secluded spot where she could work her magic. First, she twisted the long strands of her hair into five horns. Then she ground cinnabar for her face and vermillion for her body until she was as bright red as an oni of legend. Finally, she crowned her head with a three-pronged trivet, and set in it three torches of burning pine. In her teeth she clenched two further torches.

Her preparations complete, she ran south down Yamato-oojidori, torches blazing in the deep night, skin bright red and with an iron crown resting on her eyebrows. Her every aspect was that of an oni, and all who saw her collapsed, dying of terror at the manifested horror they had seen. At the end of her path was the Kawase river, where the lady dutifully sank beneath its waters. As promised by the Kami of Kifune, after 21 days she transformed in living body into an oni, the dread Bridge Princess called Hashihime.

In this way the Hashihime took her revenge on the man who was the target of her jealousy, and all of his relatives above and below. Her wrath knew no boundaries. When she slew men, she appeared as a woman. When she slew women, she appeared as a man. All in the town were a’ feared of her, and during the Hour of the Monkey none dared leave their dwelling.

Utagawa_Kuniyoshi_Watanabe_no_Tsuna_and_the_Hashihime_of_Uji

At that time, the lord Minamoto no Yorimitsu had four brave fighters and protectors. Known as the Four Heavenly Kings, they were Watanabe no Tsuna, Kimitoki, Sadamichi, and Suetake. Of these Tsuna was the greatest.

Yorimitsu had business in the town of Ichijo Omiya and dispatched Tsuna as a messenger. Tsuna arrived on horseback in the dead of night, the famous sword Higekiri (Beard Cutter) tucked into his obi. He planned a short trip, and to soon return with a message for his master. Yet when he crossed the Modari Bridge over the Hori river, on the Eastern side he saw a beautiful woman of a bit more than 20 years of age. Her skin was as white as new-fallen snow, so much that she had the visage of a yurei. Yet he saw the flair of her under-kimono peeking out—red as the red-blossomed plum tree. She bore a sash across her chest, and a sutra in the folds of her sleeves.

She stood on the bridge, facing South. She was quite alone. Tsuna mounted the bridge from the West, and the sound of his horse cracking the silence of the night.

The woman called out, “What business is yours? I am making a pilgrimage to Gojo. It is dangerous to travel alone at night. You gave me a scare!” Her tone was overly familiar for such a meeting. Tsuna answered “Come upon my horse. It would be my pleasure to help you on your errand.”

Tsuna brought his horse near and dismounted, then lifted the woman into the saddle. She held the warrior tight, as he spun his horse around and headed West. The woman directed him towards Shogimachi, saying “Great sir, in truth I am not on a pilgrimage to Gojo. My home lies a little bit outside of the capital. If you would do me the honor of taking me as far as the gates, I would be in your debt.”

Tsuna complied, saying it would be his pleasure to see the lady home. With that, the woman changed into the form of an oni, saying “It is I who shall be taking you to Mt. Atago!” She grabbed Tsuna’s topknot and flew into the air taking Tsuna with her. Tsuna was caught off guard for only a moment, before drawing Higekiri and slicing off her arm mid-air. He looked into the sky and saw the North Star as he plummeted to earth. Tsuna flees, the hand of the severed arm still holding his topknot. Where the hand held tight his hair had turned white as snow.

Okumura_Masanobu_Watanabe_no_Tsuna_and_the_Hashihime_of_Uji

Tsuna gave Lord Yoshimoto quite a shock when he returned, severed arm still firmly in place. The sorcerer Abe no Seimei was summoned, who advised Tsuna to be given seven days leave, during which time he must pray to the two Deva kings for release from the arm.

Translator’s Note:

Part one of the long-requested Hashihime. I will do a standard entry next with the history and different versions of the yokai, but I thought it might be fun to translate the actual Heiki Monogatari passage on Hashihime instead of just referencing it. Apparently I have a strange idea of fun … Heian period Japanese is hard!

This is only one version of the tale of the Hashihime of Uji. Because the Heiki Monogatari comes from an oral tradition, there are multiple versions of every tale. The second tale, of Tsuna and the sword Higekiri cutting off the arm of an oni, is only sometimes connected to the Hashihime (and even then only marginally). Other times he meets the oni at the Rashomon gate and cuts off its arm there. The tale follows with the oni coming back to Tsuna in some hidden form and stealing back its arm.

Further Reading:

For more tales of dangerous women on hyakumonogatari.com, check out:

Ushi no Koku Mairi – Shrine Visit at the Hour of the Ox

Nure Onago – The Soaked Woman

Takaonna – The Tall Woman

Takaonna – The Tall Woman

21 Nov 2012 10 Comments

by Zack Davisson in From Mizuki Shigeru, Yōkai Stories Tags: , , , , ,

Translated from Mizuki Shigeru’s Mujyara and Japanese Wikipedia

The takaonna (tall woman) is a yokai with an interesting hobby. If she is walking along, and sees a two-story brothel, she stretches the bottom half of her body so she can peek in on men enjoying the delights inside. It’s said that the takaonna was a homely woman who could never attract male companionship, changed into a yokai by her own desire.

Takaonna were first illustrated by Toriyama Seiken in his The Illustrated Night Parade of a Hundred Demons (Gazu Hyakki Yagyo ). He drew a picture and a name, but with no story or explanation for the stretching yokai.

Folklorist Fujisawa Morihiko first recorded the story of the ugly woman peeking into brothel windows in his book Complete Discussions of Yokai (Yokai Gadan Zenshu), although he speculates that the local legends of the takaonna probably came from people seeing Toriyama’s illustration, then imagining a story to go along with it. Novelist Yamada Norio furthered the legend of the takaonna in his book Travels in the Weird Tales of Tohoku (Tohoku Kaidan no Tabi). Yamada tells of a woman consumed by jealousy and lust but too ugly to get a man, who then transforms into the takaonna and menaces anyone enjoying the pleasures of the flesh that she was denied.

There is a possible (but obscure) connection to a more horrible creature from Wakayama prefecture, a female demon called the takanyobo (tall wife).

It is said that the takanyobo was once the wife of Kijishi, a woodcutter of Kizaku village. She was a strong woman who would go and cut wood with him in the forest. He thought he was a lucky man to have such a wife, but she was actually a yokai. Kijishi was a successful woodcutter, and he always kept a servant. But the servant wouldn’t stay long. Over a year, Kijishi went through 30 servants. It was only when his own baby also disappeared that Kijishi discovered the truth at last—his yokai wife had eaten them all.

Kijishi confronted his wife and threw her into a well. He thought to let her die down there, but to Kijishi’s surprise she stretched the bottom half of her body right to the top of the well, then clambered out and made her escape into the night.

Translator’s Note:

The kanji for the tall woman is exactly what it says 高 (taka; tall) + 女(onna; woman). She is most likely an original creation of Toriyama Seiken, who apparently wasn’t feeling very creative because he didn’t give her a story. Fortunately the people of the Edo period filled in for him, and came up with a nice little urban legend based on his image.

I think the connections are obvious between the takaonna and the later kuchisake onna (split-mouth woman). Both yokai are urban legends more than folklore, both are hideously ugly women, and both have a grudge against the beautiful people they can never be, and the love (or sex) they can never share.

Further Reading

For more female yokai stories, you should read:

Bakeneko Yujo – The Bakeneko Prostitutes of Edo
Nure Onago – The Soaked Woman
The Long-Tongued Old Woman

Shirime – Eyeball Butt

19 Aug 2012 6 Comments

by Zack Davisson in From Mizuki Shigeru, Yōkai Stories Tags: , ,

Translated from Mizuki Shigeru’s Mujara

In old times, this was a yokai found on the roads leading to Kyoto. The legend goes that late at night, a samurai walking down the street when a man in a kimono stepped in to block his path and said “Excuse me … just a moment of your time … “ The samurai readied himself for an attack, and shouted back “What do you want?”

The man suddenly shed his kimono and stood stark naked. He then bent over and showed his ass to the samurai, which had a single, huge eye. When the eye opened, it shown with a bright light. The samurai screamed with fright and fled from the mysterious monster.

The poet and artist Buzon included the shirime in his collection “Buzon’s Yokai Picture Scroll” (蕪村妖怪絵巻), which is the only known source of the story. It is a variation of the nopperabo legend, and the shirime is considered to be a type of nopperabo.

Regular nopperabo surprise people by suddenly showing them a featureless face, smooth as an egg. The shimire species of nopperable can give a double surprise, first showing the featureless face then bending over and exposing the eyeball butt. The shirime doesn’t have any bad intentions or evil purpose. It just thinks it is fun to surprise people.

Translator’s Note:

The shirime’s name is pretty self-explanatory; 尻 (shiri – butt)目(me – eye). The term can also be used to mean to look down on someone, or to look askance at.

Like many of this type of yokai, there isn’t much more to the story than a mischievous creature that likes to startle people. Japan has a high tolerance for body humor and grotesqueness, and the shirime is a good example of this.

Further Reading:

Check out other butt-related tales from hyakumonogatari.com:

Kappa to Shirikodama – Kappa and the Small Anus Ball

Yūrei-zu – A Portrait of a Yūrei, a Japanese Ghost

21 Mar 2012 3 Comments

by Zack Davisson in From Mizuki Shigeru, Yūrei Stories Tags: , , , ,

Translated from Mikzuki Shigeru’s Yokai Zukan

The moon hangs in the sky like the blade of a sickle, giving off a dim glow. A ghostly air permeates the scene, and from a thicket of bamboo emerges the form of a single yurei.

An emaciated body wrapped in a kyokatabira, the traditional white burial kimono, this figure is the very epitome of a yurei. Our eyes are instantly drawn to the clenched teeth from which dangles a pale, severed head. Held tightly by the hair, the yurei shows no sign of allowing its precious bounty to drop, and its expression challenges anyone to make it try. And while the eyes of the dead, severed head are closed, the eyes of the yurei look as if they could pop out of their eye sockets at any moment. An unearthly light surrounds the yurei and its head. The scene is blood curdling.

The head is painted in vivid colors, but we do not know its story. There must have been some terrible curse, some tragic event, to produce such a terrifying circumstance.

Although there are other paintings along similar themes, in this work the artist Kawanabe Kyosai has emphasized the horror, the eerie nature of the image. Kyosai is known as a master of yurei paintings, and surely this is one of his masterpieces.

Translator’s Note

This is Mizuki Shigeru’s commentary on a famous painting by Meiji-era artist Kawanabe Kyosai (河鍋暁斎; 1831-1889). Known as the last great painter in the Japanese style, Kyosai was said to be the inheritor of Hokusai and the other great ukiyo-e masters, although he did not study under Hokusai.

This painting, titled simply Yurei-zu (幽霊図), meaning “Picture of a Yurei,” is india ink on silk and was painted in 1870 – The 3rd year of the Meiji period. The painting is currently housed in the Fukuoka City Museum.

The story of this particular painting is not known, and indeed there may be no story. Kyosai painted a few portraits of yurei carrying severed heads. The reason for this is usually related to a story from Kyosai’s youth. As a nine-year old boy, he found a severed head by the side of a river, and brought it home to study and play with it like some discovered toy. When his parents found the head and ordered Kyosai to throw it back in the river, he did so only after he drew the head from every angle, fully studying his gruesome find.

Further Reading:

Check out other yurei art from hyakumonogatari.com:

Hokusai’s Manga Yurei

More Hokusai Manga Yurei

 

Kyōkotsu – The Crazy Bones Yōkai

14 Dec 2011 6 Comments

by Zack Davisson in Yōkai Stories, Yūrei Stories Tags: , , , , , ,

Translated and adapted from Hyakiyako Kaitai Shisho and other sources

Be careful when you pull up a bucket of water from an ancient, abandoned well. You might get more than you bargained for if a kyokotsu 狂骨—which translates literally as “crazy bones”—springs up from the bucket like a Jack-in-the-Box to deliver its curse.

Clad in a white burial kimono, kyokotsu almost look like a classical yurei but they lack the black/white contrast due to shocks of white hair that spring from its bleached-white skull. Kyokotsu appear as little more than bones wrapped in a shroud, springing from a well.

The yokai is best-known from Toriyama Sekien’s Edo-period yokai print-book “Konjyaku Hyaku Kishui” or  “Supplement to the Hundred Demons of the Past.” Author Kyogoku Natsuhiko also recent featured a kyokotsu in his book “Dream of the Kyokotsu.”

Sekien’s original woodblock print was accompanied by this text:

“Kyokotsu rise from the bones in the well. It is said that whosoever commits the horrendous act of abandoning august bones will find it impossible to abandon the horrendous wrath that follows.”

Sekien’s text seems to explain that kyokotsu appear from a well in response to some wrongdoing and bearing a terrible grudge. Seiken also claimed that the regional-dialect term “kyokotsu,” meaning “violent” or “furious,” is an allusion to this yokai. However, while such a term does exist, specifically in Tsuki-gun in Kanagawa prefecture, there is no concrete evidence linking either the term or Seiken’s picture to an older folktale.

It is much more likely that the opposite occurred, that Seiken heard the term “kyokotsu” and decided to invent a yurei to match—much like if an English-language author decided to create a monster called “Lazy Bones” after the pre-existing term. To get the image for his yokai, Seiken was probably just playing on works, combining the local term “kyokotsu” (crazy bones) with “gyokotsu,” which means bones from which all of the meat has fallen off. He might also have been influenced by the words “keikotsu” or “sokotsu” which can mean drifter or wander, but also can be phrased as “someone from the bottom.” It seems likely that Seiken was influenced both by these words and by the old belief of an inexhaustible grudge that can come from the bottom of wells.

There are several Japanese folklore stories—involving both yokai and yurei—that involve the bottom of a well. In Japanese folklore, water was a channel to the world of the dead, and the bottoms of wells were directly connected. Wells also served as a convenient hiding place for murders committed in the dark of the night, and the superstitious believed that any such-disposed of corpse was capable of a powerful curse. Those who died from falling in wells, by accident, suicide, or murder, were thought to transform into shiryo and haunt the well. The spirit connects to the well itself, rather than where they were murdered, and their curse is likely to fall on anyone who used the well and not specifically targeted to the murderer.

A cursed set of bones is another typical trope in Japanese folklore and does not need to be connected to a well. In her book “Nozarashi Monogatari,” the literary scholar Sawada Mizuho wrote a similar story of a weather-beaten, abandoned skull that gets its revenge.

The biggest difference between the kyokotsu and typical Japanese folklore tales of skeletal ghosts is the element of disparity between the spirit form and the physical remains. In most stories, the spirit resembles a typical Japanese yurei—with a physical, full human body—even while the discovered remains are nothing more than a pile of rotting bones. The kyokotsu is rare in that Sekien drew the spirit in skeletal form as well. Because of this, kyokotsu is most often identified as a type of yokai, being a possessed skeleton, rather than a type of yurei, a Japanese ghost.

Translator’s Note:  The manga series “Bleach” has a character called Katen Kyōkotsu that uses the same kanji as this yokai, but seems to have no other relationship.

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