Anyone who is zombie crazy like I am will love today’s yokai, Dorotabo.

Long ago, somewhere west of where Tokyo is today, a poor but hard-working farmer managed to till a piece of uncultivated land into a productive rice field, and eked out a good living for himself. But alas the man took sick and died, and his son, a lazy and dishonest person unlike his father, spent his days drinking and left the fertile land neglected. Eventually the property was sold to a new owner.

But the old man’s spirit could not rest, seeing his farm in ruins and his toil amounting to nothing, and one night his ghostly torso rose up out of the mud, crying for his field to be returned. From then on, every moonlit evening the dead farmer could be heard wailing in the distance, demanding the return of his property.

Zombie! Although there’s nothing mentioned about him eating brains, or even being able to climb out of the ground beyond his torso, this is one yokai I could really learn to like. Who knows, if Japanese zombies don’t actually climb fully out of the ground, this may be the safest place yet when the zombiepocalypse comes. Don’t kid yourself: it is coming. Take care, and don’t forgot to stock a flashlight, first aid kid, clean water, and a machete.

Dorotabo

Kuchisake-onna is a great Halloween yokai! She’s yet another one of Japan’s cursed-woman-type of yokai, but she has also evolved from an ancient ghost tale to a modern urban legend. Early versions of this story take place during the Heian Edo Period.

And older version says that a jealous samurai was married to a very, very beautiful but vain woman. He believed that she had been unfaithful to him, and attacked her, slitting her face from ear to ear, and saying, “Who will find you beautiful now!?”

Afterwards we move into the urban legend. A ghostly woman can be seen wandering the streets in the night mist. She wears a surgical mask (which isn’t uncommon at all in Japan), and approaches a stranger asking, “Am I beautiful?” If the stranger answers yes, she removes the mask, revealing her mutilated face and asks threateningly, “Even now?” If the stranger answers, “No,” she slits his face with scissors to resemble her own. If he answers, “Yes,” she follows him home and murders him at the doorstep to his house.

Some say that if you answer, “So-so,” she’ll be confused for a few moments — enough to run away.

Kuchisake-onna

There were a number of kuchisake-onna sightings in the 20th century. Apparently, in the 70’s, a woman who was chasing little children was hit by a car, and her face was ripped open from ear to ear. After that accident, a large panic of sightings happened. Other variations of the urban legend have to deal with a woman butchered by plastic surgery. In any case, it’s a pretty scary yokai, and another one of my favorites. Enjoy the picture!

In a small village there lived a stingy miser who, because he could not bear the expense of paying for food for a wife, lived entirely by himself.

One day he met a woman who did not eat anything, whom he immediately took for his wife. Because she never ate a thing, and was still a hard worker, the old miser was extraordinarily thrilled with her, but on the other hand he began to wonder why his stores of rice were steadily decreasing.

One day the man pretended to leave for work, but instead stayed behind to spy on his new wife. To his horror, he saw his wife’s hair part on the back of her head, her skull split wide revealing a gaping mouth. She unbound her hair, which reached out like tentacles to grasp the rice and shovel it into the hungry mouth.

A futakuchi-onna is another kind of woman who becomes a yokai through a curse. In the back of her head, beneath the hair, the skull splits open and a second mouth, with lips, teeth, and a tongue, appears. The hair also gains the ability to move about like snakes and snatch food, shoveling it into the second, hungry mouth. Some say that the curse is bestowed onto a woman who lets her stepchild die of starvation while giving her own child enough to eat. Others say it’s a curse on the man who marries her, for being too miserly and not wanting to pay for her food. Either way, I’m sure it’s a bitch for dieting.

Futakuchi-onna

Filth-licker. That’s what today’s yokai’s name means. Filth-licker. How cool is that?

This disgusting little yokai isn’t so well-known, and doesn’t have much literature about it, but the general story is that it likes to hang out in dirty bathrooms and washrooms, licking up the filth and grime left around the place. I suppose it’s a good way to tell your kids to clean up after themselves: “Clean up, or the filth-licker will come!” I wouldn’t want to be around to see the hairballs this thing could cough up.

But I suppose you might be happy to have one of these nearby if a hyosube happened to visit your house the night before…

Akaname

There certainly are a lot of women yokai in Japanese folklore, some of which I’ve posted, and some of which I’ll be posting soon. I guess it’s not really limited to Japan though — after all, witches are a pretty common Western monster. Today’s yokai is a kind of witch, Yama-uba. Her name means mountain crone, and she plays the part. She preys on travelers lost in the woods, sometimes disguising herself as a beautiful young maiden, other times sneaking up on them and ensnaring them in her hair, other time offering to help them and instead capturing them, fattening them up to eat later. Interestingly, there are also stories of her being benevolent; according to legend she suckled and raised the baby Kintaro, who grew up to be a sort of Japanese Hercules.

Yama-uba is interesting to me because the mountain hag is such a staple of folkore, regardless of the culture. She could be any number of fairy tale witches, Eastern Europe’s Baba-yaga, even the creepy old bag lady who lives at the end of the street. I guess people have a natural fear of old women.

Yama-uba

On another note, Pink Tentacle has another cool post about yokai, featuring anatomical drawings of their insides. Check it out!

The month is just about halfway done, and I wanted to save some of the more Halloween-ish yokai for a date closer to Halloween… well I think that time has come. Today’s yokai is another one of my favorites: Yuki-onna, the snow woman. There are a few legends surround her, but the most famous one, as told by Lafcadio Hearn (and shamelessly copied from Wikipedia), goes like this:

A long time ago, there lived two woodcutters, Minokichi and Mosaku. Minokichi was young and Mosaku was very old.

One winter day, they could not come back home because of a snowstorm. They found a hut in the mountain and decided to sleep there. On this particular evening, Minokichi woke up and found a beautiful lady with white clothes. She breathed on old Mosaku and he was frozen to death.

She then approached Minokichi to breathe on him, but stared at him for a while, and said, “I thought I was going to kill you, the same as that old man, but I will not, because you are young and beautiful. You must not tell anyone about this incident. If you tell anyone about me, I will kill you.”

Several years later, Minokichi met a beautiful young lady, named Oyuki (yuki = “snow”) and married her. She was a good wife. Minokichi and Oyuki had several children and lived happily for many years. Mysteriously, she did not age.

One night, after the children were asleep, Minokichi said to Oyuki: “Whenever I see you, I am reminded of a mysterious incident that happened to me. When I was young, I met a beautiful young lady like you. I do not know whether it was dream or she was a Yuki-onna…”

After finishing his story, Oyuki suddenly stood up, and said “That woman you met was me! I told you that I would kill you if you ever told anyone about that incident. However, I can’t kill you because of our children. Take care of our children… ” Then she melted and disappeared. No one saw her again.

There are a few other versions of the story, but I like that one best, partially because it’s the first one I heard — or actually saw, on a Japanese ghost stories DVD. She is another very popular yokai in Japanese pop culture, appearing in many comic books, games, and so on.

Yuki-onna

The Tanuki is another very special yokai, like the Kitsune I painted earlier this week. It’s importance in Japan can’t really be overstated. This is another creature that, if you visit here, you will see hundreds and hundreds of, wherever you go. Many houses and shops, especially in rural areas, have tanuki statues at their doorsteps. They’re a common character on children’s shows, and in advertisements.

Like kitsune, tanuki are extremely magical creatures. They’re powerful sorcerers, and one of their most famous powers is shapechanging. Probably the most notable power is actually located in — get ready for this — their scrotums. Tanuki have incredibly magical scrotums and testicles, and virtually every likeness of tanuki in Japan comes with a very exaggerated pair of balls. Go ahead, do an image search if you don’t believe me.

Their scrotums really are amazing though. Tanuki can do almost anything with them — parachute, hunt, make music, fight… you name it. In fact, even ancient paintings of tanuki by famous artists like Hokusai depict them doing incredible things with them. In one painting, a tanuki enlarges his scrotum and uses it as a sumo stage, while dozens of tanuki sit on it and watch the competition. In another story, a tanuki decides to masquerade as a shopkeeper to trick humans, and his scrotum actually becomes the entire store — people enter it through a door, talk to the tanuki who is disguised as a shopkeeper (behind the counter, so they can’t see he’s actually connected to a room) and buy illusionary wares made from — you guessed it — scrotum. In that story, the purchaser accidentally dropped his lit cigarette onto the floor, which burned the tanuki and broke the spell, running him out of town. Talk about caveat emptor!

Anyway, here is my tanuki, playing at a festival:

Tanuki

(And if you’re wondering about the lack of testicles in my picture, look again. That’s not a drum he’s playing…)