Ōkubi

What it is

Ōkubi is a yōkai, one of the uncanny beings that fill Japanese folklore. Its shape is a head grown enormous, most often a woman's, and its teeth are blackened the way a married woman's once were. Those who told stories about it held that such a head is a human vengeful spirit, or an obsession that has hardened into a monster. It is feared for its power to make people ill: in the best-known account, a head nearly two metres tall breathes on a man and the skin where its breath lands turns yellow and swells. The name itself means the giant head. The figure is recorded from mid-Edo writing and still turns up in Japanese comics and animation today.

Where it comes from

The oldest written accounts belong to the mid-Edo period of Japan. Tōtei Bukkairoku, a book of monster tales from that era, tells of a man who opened his storage room and found the enormous face of an old woman waiting inside. Hori Bakusui, a haiku poet of the same time, recorded a different encounter, a head that showed itself on a wall after rain. The figure's beginnings are debated: some hold that Ōkubi is not a monster of old folklore but an invention made to mock monks who broke their precepts, a satirical birth rather than a legendary one.

How it is done

Two Edo-era tellings show how meetings with the head go. In the tale from Tōtei Bukkairoku, a man opens his storage room and finds the vast face of an old woman there. He prods it with a pair of tongs and gets no response; when he touches it with his hand, the skin of the face feels sticky. Hori Bakusui's account is more alarming. On a night after rain, with the moon out and a sound of thunder, a head about two metres tall appears on top of a wall. It blows its breath at someone, and the part the breath touches turns yellow and swollen. A doctor prescribes a medicated bath to cure the swelling.

Tools and materials

The head carries one mark drawn from everyday life: teeth painted black, as those of a married woman were. On a face of giant size, that domestic sign makes the monster stranger, since the face carries the mark of a wedded woman even at monstrous scale. In Shigeru Mizuki's manga the creature gains a second mark, a left eye sunk hollow, which the story calls very frightening. In the old tale the only implement present belongs to the man, not the monster: tongs, used to test whether the face will answer.

What it is for

Ōkubi is not a charm or a rite that anyone works, and no prayers are addressed to it. It sits on the feared side of folklore, a being people hope never to meet. The one power the tales give it is the ability to make people ill. In Hori Bakusui's telling that harm comes as a breath, and the cure comes from an ordinary doctor with a medicated bath. One line of thought does give the figure a purpose, if a literary one: that it was invented to mock monks who broke their precepts, so the monster would carry a rebuke rather than a curse.

Peoples and places

Everything recorded about Ōkubi comes from Japan. Its first appearances are in writing of the mid-Edo period, in the monster-book Tōtei Bukkairoku and in the works of the poet Hori Bakusui. In modern times the head has moved into popular storytelling. Natsuhiko Kyogoku made it the title figure of a story in his collection Hyakkiyakou-yō, where it appears in a morgue as a vision seen by a man who blames himself for his own desires, laughing in the likeness of a female corpse. Shigeru Mizuki cast it as a villain monster in his manga GeGeGe no Kitaro, giving it a sunken left eye, power over bones and the air, and an origin in canned human souls that shrivels the body while the head grows.

What people believe

In the lore of yōkai, monsters are not always born as monsters. Ōkubi is said to have a human core: its true identity, people held, is a vengeful spirit of the dead, or an obsession that has gone on until it took a body of its own. The appearance matches that story, since the head wears the blackened teeth that marked a married woman, something once human and domestic turned frightening. The Edo tale treats the being oddly calmly: the man who finds it names it, pokes it and finds it sticky and silent, while later tellings give it breath that wounds and, in modern fiction, will and malice enough for villainy.

Compare and confuse

Japanese folklore keeps other yōkai whose heads are their most striking feature, and two are named beside Ōkubi: Rokurokubi and Wanyūdō. Ōkubi's own form is the starkest of such shapes, a single head at giant scale, marked out by a married woman's blackened teeth.

Today

The head lives on in Japan through fiction rather than ritual. Shigeru Mizuki made it a villain monster in his manga GeGeGe no Kitaro, where its shape comes from eating canned human souls, a diet that shrivels the limbs and swells the head. This version has a sunken left eye that readers find frightening, and it moves bones by telekinesis while stirring the air into vacuums and storms. Natsuhiko Kyogoku gave the name to a story in his collection Hyakkiyakou-yō, where the head appears in a morgue as a vision of a man's self-blame, taking first the likeness of a female corpse and then the faces of women from his past.

Questions people ask about Ōkubi

Good reading and sources

• Ōkubi on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data