After painting tonight’s yokai, I slipped on the stairs and broke my drawing arm… Which is pretty upsetting on top of being painful. It’s not a terrible break, but it’s enough that it will slow me down for the rest of the month. I don’t think it should outright prevent me from painting though. Maybe one day there will be stories about how an artist got punished by yokai for drawing too many of them…
Anyway, rather than dwell on unfortunate things, that’s look at something even more horrible: tonight’s yokai! This one is called an “ōbōzu bakemono.” Ōbōzu are common figures in yokai lore, although they go by many names, like ōnyūdō, ōhōshi, and others. All of these words mean “giant Buddhist priest.” And of course bakemono just means “monster.”
Why priests are such a common occurrence is a bit of a mystery, but there are several ways to look at it. One is that priests live outside of normal society, close to the realm of the supernatural, and they have that in common with yokai. Temples also had a lot of power in the middle ages and early modern Japan, and so in some ways they were a mysterious force to be reckoned with; just like monsters are. And of course, artists often liked to satirize what they saw around them, especially impious or dishonest priests who did not practice what they preach. Since artists were responsible for designing a lot of yokai, they had the means and motivation to invent all sorts of horrible priest yokai, and these were popular among commoners who also hated the dishonest priests. Even today we sometimes see priests driving porches, or televangelists with personal jet planes. This kind of corruption is universally hated, and its not easy to see how people could turn that into a monster.
I’m not sure why, but the ending of this story always makes me laugh. The climax of this story is brutally violent that it makes the final sentence, with its chilly crotch patting, seem tame and silly by comparison.
The Ōbōzu Bakemono at Lord Ogasawara’s House
During the Keichō era (1596 to 1615), the wife of a certain Ogawasara contracted smallpox at around age 45 and was in critical condition. Lord Ogasawara was in the next room discussing medicine, when a number of ladies came running out of the back room shouting, “How terrifying!”
When Lord Ogasawara went inside to investigate, he saw a giant, black monk towering over the folding screen and laughing at his wife. Lord Ogasawara immediately drew his katana and slashed at it, but the monk vanished.
One night, thinking it would return, he called five or six samurai to stand watch. Just as expected, the monk’s head rose up from behind the folding screen again.
“What are you that can create such an apparition?” he demanded. Then the monk snatched his wife, kicked through the ceiling, and tried to climb out. The samurai grabbed onto her and tried to hold her back, while the monk tried to pull her up through the ceiling. They pulled with such force that the wife was ripped in two, and the monk took her head and left.
Afterwards, for about a year, whenever the lord went to the outhouse, he was often subjected to all sorts of terrible things, such as cold hands patting his crotch, or having the door latch locked from the outside.
