Rokurokubi

What it is

Rokurokubi is a being in Japanese folklore, counted among the yōkai, the strange apparitions of that tradition. Outwardly such a person is unremarkable; the difference lies in the neck. One kind draws the neck out to a great length. The other kind, called nukekubi, lets the head leave the shoulders completely, and it travels through the air alone. Accounts of them run through the ghost-story collections of the Edo period and through the illustrated compendia of strange beings that came after. The tales are told as encounters, rumours and illnesses rather than as a practice anyone sets out to learn.

Where it comes from

Writers in Japan connected the head-detaching form with older Chinese material. Chinese lore told of the hitōban, rendered as flying head barbarians, whose heads used their ears as wings and fed on insects, and of the rakutō, a head that departs while the torso stays at rest. Both carried a line around the neck. The stretching neck is the later idea: stories of it begin in the Edo period, in works such as Buya Zokuda, Kanden Kōhitsu and Yasō Kidan. One suggestion is that the long neck grew from pictures showing a cord between a flying head and its body, which viewers took for a stretched neck.

How it is done

The event is told as happening at night, to a person asleep. Either the neck lengthens, or the head slips free and drifts about. In one account a servant's chest gives off something like steam, which thickens until her head is hidden, and then the neck seems to rise. A sleeper whose body is shifted while the head is away is said to be unable to take the head back again. The best-known nukekubi are said to attack people in the dark and drink their blood. Those who wake often recall only a dream, as in the tale of a chased head heard complaining of a frightening dream.

Tools and materials

The identifying mark is a line or bruise circling the neck. In the Higo story the innkeeper's wife is normal again the next day but bears such a line, and a woman of Tawa in Sanuki is said to have a ring-like bruise. In the tale of a village in the folds of Mount Yoshino, every resident, children included, wears a scarf to hide that mark. Elsewhere the tales turn on ordinary things: a white dog and its liver in one, a paper lantern's oil licked by a stretching neck in another.

Who does it

Most rokurokubi in the surviving tales are women: wives, daughters, geisha and household servants. A few men are named, among them a temple manservant who says he suffers from the nukekubi illness and leaves his post, and a male rokurokubi displayed in an Edo freak show in 1810. Several accounts treat the condition as something a person has rather than a separate creature. The trait is discovered, usually by an employer or a spouse, and it often ends in dismissal or in the close of a marriage.

Peoples and places

Japan is the setting throughout. Tales name Echizen, Higo, Hitachi, Shimōsa, Echigo and Sanuki, sometimes adding the present-day prefecture, such as Fukui, Kumamoto or Kagawa. One story puts a whole village of rokurokubi in the recesses of Mount Yoshino. The head-flying motif is traced beyond Japan to China, and the commentator Yamaoka Genrin, writing in 1686, noted that such reports came often from South-East Asia while being unheard of in the capital.

What people believe

Several Edo writers read the separation as the soul slipping out of the body in sleep, which doubled as an explanation of sleepwalking. The Sorori Monogatari of 1663 has a woman's stray thoughts wandering while she sleeps, and the later Hokusō Sadan says the seeming head was the soul wearing that shape. Parapsychology has called such a shape ectoplasm. Other tellers frame it as karma: in Jippensha Ikku's story a murdered woman's resentment works through a girl's stretching neck, and a monk builds a mound in repentance. In Kanden Kōhitsu the neck lengthens because the woman's heart has become loose.

When it is done

The tales place the event at night, during sleep, and have the neck or head back in place by morning. In the Higo account the innkeeper's wife is herself again the following day, with a line left round her neck. One Osaka story has a daughter's neck stretch every night while her parents pray in Shinto and Buddhist fashion.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Yamaoka Genrin, in Kokon Hyaku Monogatari Hyōban of 1686, set Japanese reports beside Chinese examples and concluded that odd things gather in distant lands and resist ordinary judgement. The essayist Ban Kōkei treated an elongating neck as a bodily affliction. Lafcadio Hearn retold the foreign nukekubi as spirits posing as woodcutters who kill travellers. In the Meiji period, magazines printed drawings and explanations of the stage version, at a time when scientifically minded writers were actively exposing claims of mystery.

Compare and confuse

The detaching form is set beside Chinese beings: the hitōban, or flying head barbarians, and the rakutō, a head that floats off while the body stays on the futon. A Chinese tale gives an Eastern Wu general, Zhu Huan, a servant of the rakutō kind. The word rokurokubi also names a fairground act built around a headless figure, so the same name covers both the apparition of the tales and its imitation on a stage.

Today

Rokurokubi remain in print through collections of kaidan and compendia of yōkai, and through Hearn's retelling for English readers. They also had a working life as entertainment: a freak show in Edo in 1810 exhibited a man with a lengthened neck, and in the Taishō period businesses booked rokurokubi acts for tents at temple and shrine fairs, where they proved popular. Meiji-period magazines of the 1800s carried pictures and explanations of the stage version.

Questions people ask about Rokurokubi

Good reading and sources

• Rokurokubi on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data