Ningyo

What it is

The ningyo belongs to Japanese writing about strange beings of the water. Its name means human fish, and it is drawn or described with a person's head or upper body joined to a fish below. Because the word carries no gender, it takes in mermen as well as mermaids, and English-language scholars sometimes keep the literal rendering human-fish for that reason. Kojien, a standard Japanese dictionary, once described the creature as a woman above and a fish below, and a revision widened the upper half to a human, most often a woman. The old accounts do not settle the shape. Some give a human head on a fish body; others describe a scaly thing with a fish head and four limbs.

Where it comes from

The oldest recorded captures come from the seventh century. The Nihon Shoki, a court chronicle finished in 720, tells of man-like fish netted in 619, in the fourth month on the Gamō River in Ōmi Province and again at Horie in Settsu Province. Those were freshwater creatures. Later reports usually concern the sea. During the Kamakura and Muromachi periods a ningyo coming ashore was read as a warning, and strandings in northern Japan were blamed for battles and disasters that followed. The word ningyo is missing from the earliest texts. A later account credits Prince Shōtoku with knowing it, a claim scholars treat with doubt, and a large fish reported ashore in 1247 was given the name only in a seventeenth-century recompilation.

What it is for

Two uses run through the stories. As an omen, a ningyo appearing or beaching is held to announce calamity, and in medieval northern Japan it was tied to coming battles; Prince Shōtoku is said to have rejected one as unlucky and had it thrown away. As a substance, its flesh is believed to give long life. The best-known tale turns a girl who ate it into Yao Bikuni, the eight-hundred-year Buddhist nun. Not every report is grim: a giant ningyo reportedly shot in 1805 was described in a printed pamphlet as lucky.

Peoples and places

The creature belongs to Japan, where the accounts and the pictures were made. The earliest catches are placed in Ōmi and Settsu, the medieval omens in the north, and the Yao Bikuni story in Obama in Wakasa Province, with a temple on the mountain at Kūin-ji remembered as her home. That tale survives in many local versions: the father is a wealthy man named Takahashi in the temple's own history, a fisherman in others, and the daughter eats the flesh by accident so that the household is not blamed. Chinese writing supplied two older fish-people, the limbed lingyu and the limbless chiru, both from the Shan hai jing.

What people believe

Behind the stories sits a world where the sea sends signs and where deeds carry across lives. A ningyo surfacing is treated as a warning of disaster rather than as a monster to fight, and fishermen are said to have made a habit of letting one go when it came up in the net. In the foundation story of Kannonshō-ji, a ningyo in a pool near Lake Biwa tells Prince Shōtoku that a bad former life left it in that shape, and the prince builds a temple to help it toward salvation. In the Yao Bikuni telling, a dragon king appears as a white-bearded man to hand over the flesh.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Researchers have looked for real animals behind the reports. Minakata Kumagusu took the childlike freshwater catch of 619 to be a Japanese giant salamander. Others proposed the dugong, though its range reaches only as far north as Okinawa, and critics noted that Japanese people saw living dugongs mainly from the Meiji era onward, while older eyewitness testimony exists. Steller's sea cow, a Bering Sea relative, might have strayed into northern waters; seals and dolphins are also suggested. A drawing on a thirteenth-century wooden tablet points to a seal or similar animal. The red cockscomb or light red hair in old descriptions supports the idea that oarfish, which strand on northern coasts, fed the lore.

Compare and confuse

The ningyo is routinely rendered as mermaid, a word that hides its breadth, since the Japanese term covers both sexes. Its nearest relatives in the written record are Chinese: the four-limbed hill-fish, lingyu, and the limbless chiru, both from the Classic of Mountains and Seas. A 1712 Japanese compendium redrew the Chinese hill-fish as a two-armed, legless being and matched it with the ningyo, producing a figure close to the European mermaid. Western natural history, read in Dutch, brought the European siren image into Japanese books from the eighteenth century.

Questions people ask about Ningyo

Good reading and sources

• Ningyo on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data