Nuribotoke

What it is

The nuribotoke is a yōkai, a being from Japanese folklore, and it belongs to picture scrolls rather than to any rite. Painters give it the body of a walking corpse: darkened skin, a swollen belly, and both eyeballs hanging loose from their sockets. Its name, Lacquered Buddha, comes from that black sheen and from the priestly figure it often cuts. No surviving caption explains what the artists meant by it, so the figure is known largely through its pictures and through the guesses later writers have made about them. It is counted among the many creatures catalogued in Japanese yōkai art.

Where it comes from

Most images of the nuribotoke come from the Edo period. It is drawn in the Hyakkai Zukan, a scroll by Sawaki Suushi, and in Gazu Hyakki Yagyō by Toriyama Sekien. An Edo-period Sugoroku board game, the Jikkai Sugoroku kept at the National Diet Library, spells the name ぬりぼとけ in kana. The same figure turns up unnamed in Kawanabe Kyōsai's Gyōsai Hyakki Gadan of 1889. The Kiyū Shōran, an Edo-period text, mentions a creature called nurihotoke in the Bakemono E of Kōhōgen Motonobu, which points to an older picture type. A Hyakki Yagyō manuscript in the Matsui Library labels the figure kurobō and places it first among its creatures.

Tools and materials

The butsudan, a small Buddhist altar kept in the home for ancestors, is the setting most often tied to the creature. Only one of the surviving pictures, the one by Sekien, places it at a butsudan. Depictions also give it a long black appendage behind the body, drawn as a catfish's tail in some scrolls and as long black hair in others, and this detail is taken as a hint that the corpse may not be acting on its own. The hanging eyes are the creature's other sign.

What it is for

Belief about the nuribotoke turns on the home altar. It is said to come out of a butsudan that has been left open all night or kept in poor condition. Sometimes it wears the face of a family member who has died and frightens the household; sometimes it appears to tend an altar that is falling into disrepair. In other tellings it poses as a priest, speaks for the Buddha, and hands out false prophecies to mislead worshippers. It is also said to dance, above all in the demons' night parade.

What people believe

The creature belongs to a world in which a household altar keeps the dead close, and in which hotoke, the word for Buddha, may also mean a spirit of the deceased. In that frame a neglected butsudan becomes a possible door for something from the world of the dead. Writers have offered more than one explanation: an ancestor, another being dressed in a corpse, or a body moved by a force that is not its own. The catfish tail supports the last idea. A priest that lies to worshippers plays on trust in a familiar religious figure.

Compare and confuse

The Bakemonozukushi Emaki, an Edo-period scroll, was made by writing new captions over pictures that already existed, and every creature in it received a different name. A figure thought to be taken from the nuribotoke is called umibōzu there. That umibōzu is said to have eaten fishers near the inlet of Shido in Sanuki Province, now Kagawa Prefecture, until people found a way to kill it. Kurobō is the second name the nuribotoke carries in these scrolls.

Today

Writing about yōkai from the Shōwa period onward added explanations for the figure. Some said it bursts from an altar to startle people; others said a lazy monk comes out of one and attacks them. Morihiko Fujisawa, in the 1929 collection Yōkai Gadan Zenshū Nihonhen, captioned Sekien's picture as an oddity and a spirit of objects. One reading of the hanging eyes asks what the eyes of a household with a dirty butsudan could see, and answers that they see nothing at all.

Questions people ask about Nuribotoke

Good reading and sources

• Nuribotoke on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data