Greetings yokai fans!
Tonight’s entry is a pretty obscure yokai, but he’s a funny one. Despite being another one of Toriyama Sekien’s inventions (he just slapped a name and an explanation onto a yokai that had already been painted in pictures scrolls for hundreds of years) he manages to give it some meaning and flesh it out into a really interesting creature.
Doing the writeup on this yokai forced me to read some of Tsurezuregusa, as well as the song from the Noh play, which was fun but not exactly a quick and easy translation. Sometimes the yokai which are obscure and have precious little written about them can turn into a rabbit hole when trying to unravel their mysteries. And then trimming that down into a concise explanation is another task!
Anyway, I hope you enjoy it:
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