Today’s illustration was once again done by my wife, to give my arm a day’s rest while it heals. I’ll be back to painting again tomorrow though.

Tonight’s story is one of my favorites due to the descriptions of the final scene. The way the sound is described, and the ultimate reveal are so unique, twisted, and spooky that it sticks out in my mind as one of the best stories in Shokoku hyakumonogatari. This story is of course the basis for the yokai known as tenome, although that name was not invented until later. For now, it is just a bakemono.

The Man Who Had His Bones Pulled Out by a Bakemono

There was a rumor that a bakemono lived in the graveyard at Shichijō Kawara in Kyōto. A group of young men gathered together and made a bet to test their courage.

One of them went to the graveyard at midnight and planted a stake in the ground and then pasted a piece of paper to it as proof that he had been there. As he was leaving, an old man of around eighty years, gray haired and standing about 242 centimeters in height, his face sickly white like a calabash flower, with eyeballs in the palms of his hands and two protruding front teeth, came chasing after him.

The man was so taken aback that he ran into a nearby temple and begged the monk to protect him from the monster. The monk opened up a long trunk and hid the man inside of it. The monk watched as the bakemono pursued the young man up to the temple, looked around for a while, and then left. There was a sound like a dog gnawing on a bone near the long trunk, and he heard someone groaning, but the monk was too frightened to move.

Then, after the bakemono had left, the monk went to let the man out of the trunk, but when he opened up the lid, he found that the young man had been stripped of his bones and was nothing but skin.