Imagine this situation: you drive downtown for a summer fireworks festival. You find an awesome parking spot, with an elevated view over the river, where you will be able to see the sky and the reflection of the fireworks in the water. Just as you start backing into your place, some jerk pulls forward into the space and dings your car pretty bad. Today’s yokai is so relate-able to today that even though it takes place long ago, it feels fresh.

Rewind the above story 1000 years. Oboroguruma is from the Tale of Genji, one of the oldest novels ever written, and one of Japan’s most famous and treasured pieces of literature. One of the stories depicts a scene in which a noblewoman has her really good parking spot taken from her, and has her carriage dinged up, and ultimately loses the parknig spot to a younger, prettier woman.

The yokai part comes later, when the anger of that night settles into her carriage, and it turns into a ghost-like spirit of a cart. From then on, on certain nights, the ghost cart would roam the street, animated by its owners jealousy and rage…

Interestingly, oboroguruma doesn’t actually appear in the Tale of Genji. It was actually created centuries after the novel and first existed just as a picture of a cart with a spooky face, perhaps a tsukumogami. Later, that illustration became attached to the famous cart story in the Tale of Genji. In essense, it is a piece of fanfiction that has become canon!