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Today’s A-Yokai-A-Day comes from Ōshū, another name for Mutsu Province, which is today Fukushima, Miyagi, Iwate and Aomori Prefectures, and a bit of Akita Prefecture. However, Ōshū also sometimes included Dewa Province (now Yamagata and Akita Prefectures), covering the entirety of Tōhoku. The castle in the story, Komatsu, uses the latter definition, and stood in what is today Nakakomatsu, Yamagata Prefecture.

This story is interesting because it features a number of common kaidan tropes: an outhouse; a severed head; and a female monster with ohaguro. The outhouse is a classic location because let’s face it; going to the toilet at night is scary enough, but imagine doing it in an age with no electricity and no plumbing, where wild animals can easily crawl into the toilet, and where weeds and plants spring up from it as well. In cities, you might have a properly boxed-off hut with a rudimentary sewage system in it, but in the countryside often all you had was a large, communal, clay pot out in the fields. Severed heads need no explanation as to why they are scary. As for monsters frequently being female, we can blame this on patriarchal society. It was believed that women were more emotional than men, and thus much more prone to becoming overly emotionally attached to things than men. And as I discussed in yesterday’s post, attachment is the reason people become monsters. So there is a logical, albeit sexist, reason that there are so many female monsters in Japanese folklore. And the black-toothed look of ohaguro is a bit frightening today, but it seems that Edo period readers also found it frightening, considering how often it shows up in monsters.

The story calls this monster a bakemono, which pretty much just means “monster.” It’s a generic term that doesn’t specifically point to any cause. Flying heads are sometimes called nukekubi or rokurokubi, although these necessarily have a body somewhere, and we don’t know if this bakemono does or not.

The Bakemono of Komatsu Castle in Ōshū
Not long ago, there was a samurai who was guarding a castle in a place called Komatsu, in Ōshū. His wife was the daughter of a certain Uwaki. One night, when she went to the outhouse, a woman’s head with blackened ohaguro teeth flew from across the way and grinned at her. She was horrified, but she knew that it would be bad to be defeated by such a thing, and so with her eyes open wide she glared back at the head. The head lost the staring contest, and then gradually flew away from her until it disappeared.

The woman was so happy that she left the outhouse and returned to her room, only to find that the lantern had gone out. She checked the next room, but the lantern in that room had gone out too, and it was pitch black. At that moment, she fainted.

When her husband returned home and searched for her, he found her in another room, lying flat on the floor, breathless and unresponsive. Everybody was astonished. They gave her some smelling salts, and finally she came to  her senses.

When they asked her what had happened, she told them the whole story. Afterwards, they built a new outhouse in a new location, and the monster never appeared again.