Greetings yokai fans!

Not all water-themed yokai can be bright blues and greens that make you think of tropical waters and cool you down. Some of them have to reflect the oppressive summer heat that makes August in Japan so unbearable! The color palette in today’s illustration just screams “August” to me.

Naegatsuku was delayed a bit because I was trying to find out more about the origin of its name. As a small, local yokai, there is very little writing about the subject, both online and in my personal collection of yokai encyclopedias. There are plenty of references to the same legends about it, but nothing that goes particularly deep. In order to learn more about it, my wife and I contacted the Okagaki town hall in Fukuoka. Okagaki is the town which incorporates the territory where this yokai originally came from: a tiny villlage called Hatsu, located on a narrow strip of beach between a high mountain and the Sea of Japan.

We sometimes contact town halls and culture centers like this to find local pronunciations of strange names and things like that, so we hoped that they could tell us more about the origins of naegatsuku — particularly its name. As you may have figured out by seeing other yokai names like kitsunetsuki, tanukitsuki, tsukimono, tsukumogami; the “tsuku” part means to possess or attach to a person. So the name naegatsuku refers to being possessed by a spirit called a nae. Nae ga tsuku.

From its description, its clear that its a kind of gakitsuki (possession by a gaki). So it’s not hard to know what the yokai is about. But the mystery is where the name came from. What is a nae? It appears to be a local name for some kind of spirit, but the origin is not recorded anywhere. And unfortunately, the Okagaki city hall was unable to help. They were very enthusiastic and were quite interested themselves when we explained the situation to them. However, because of the small size of the town, that information just doesn’t seem to exist. Sadly, this is the case for local yokai all over Japan — as time passes, information is lost, and only hints of it remain.

So we may never know what a “nae” meant hundreds of years ago, but at least we still have the main idea of this yokai preserved. Here is its story. Enjoy!

ナエガツク
なえがつく

Translation: possession by a “nae”
Habitat: drowned corpses
Diet: insatiable

Appearance: Naegatsuku is a phenomenon in which a person becomes haunted or possessed by an evil spirit and develops an insatiable hunger. It is a type of gakitsuki (possession by gaki–hungry ghosts from Buddhist cosmology)

Interactions: Naegatsuku happens to people when they see the corpse of a drowned victim. How or why it happens in unknown, but merely witnessing a drowned corpse is enough for this possession to occur.

Origin: Naegatsuku comes from the folklore of Okagaki in Fukuoka Prefecture. The origin of its name is a mystery. Nae may be a local name for a drowned spirit, so it literally means possession by a nae. Based on descriptions of the phenomenon and similarities to other yōkai, a nae sounds very similar to a gaki (preta in Sanskrit). When a person dies with lingering attachment in their heart (such as hunger), their spirit can transform into a hungry ghost called a gaki. Gaki are obsessed with food and driven solely by the desire to eat; yet they are never able to satiate their hunger. Their throats narrow so that they cannot swallow, and whatever food they do eat never satisfies their hunger. Their bellies swell distend from their bodies, their eyes become sunken and their skin becomes thin. Their entire existence is suffering. When gaki possess the living, they impart some of their traits onto their victims–an overwhelming appetite, an inability to swallow food, or physical characteristics such as a distended belly.

Legends: A young man from the village of Hatsu in Okagaki once witnessed the corpse of a person who drowned at sea. He was suddenly so overcome with hunger that he rushed home and in one sitting ate enough rice to feed five people.