Nopperabo and Hearn's "Mujina" — How a Ghost Story Scares You Twice

What makes the nopperabo so memorable isn't just the missing face. The scariest moment is the second scare, the one that comes right after you think you're safe. "Mujina," one of the stories in Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan, builds that second scare beautifully. This time, let's look less at the plot and more at how the story is put together.

The first scare: no face

The story is set on Kii-no-kuni-zaka, a slope in the Akasaka area of old Edo (today's Tokyo). As the tale describes it, there was a moat on one side and high walls on the other, and after dark hardly anyone passed by.

One night a merchant climbing the slope finds a young woman crouched by the moat, crying. He tries to comfort her, but she keeps her face hidden in her sleeve. After he speaks to her a few times, she slowly turns around and strokes her face with her hand. It has no eyes, no nose, and no mouth.

That's the first scare, and it lands. In most ghost stories, this would be the climax. In "Mujina," it's only halfway.

The second scare: the person you ran to

The merchant runs screaming up the slope until he spots the lantern of a soba noodle stall, a small street stand selling buckwheat noodles. He rushes in. The vendor asks what's wrong, and the merchant, gasping, tries to explain what he just saw.

The vendor strokes his own face and asks, "Was it something like this?" His face, too, is smooth as an egg. Then the lantern goes out, and the story ends.

The second scare feels different from the first. The first is "a stranger was strange." The second is "even the person who was supposed to help me was strange." The feeling that the safe place wasn't safe after all stays with you after the story is over.

A story pattern: the "repeated apparition"

In Japanese ghost-story traditions, tales like this, where someone flees one encounter only to meet the same uncanny thing again, are recognized as a pattern known as saido no kai, roughly "the apparition met a second time." It is said that stories of this shape turn up in many regions, and not only with faceless yokai.

What makes the pattern work is that the second apparition looks exactly like the first. No new monster is needed. Repeating the same blank face is enough to double the fear. And by having the vendor ask, "Was it like this?", the story takes away the very words the merchant was about to say. It's a small story with no wasted parts.

A culprit named only in the title

One more interesting detail: the story is called "Mujina," not "Nopperabo." No mujina ever appears in the text. But because the title names it, readers realize at the end that the merchant has been tricked by an animal.

Mujina is a word that usually means the Japanese badger, though in some regions it has been used without much distinction from the tanuki, or raccoon dog. Like foxes and tanuki, it has long been described as an animal that fools people. Set it next to the bake-danuki and the fox spirit in the Zukan, and you can see how often "trickster animals" have played the hidden culprit in Japanese ghost stories.

Knowing the culprit is a relief, in a way. Even without a face, it might just be an animal that likes to tease people. Maybe that's why the nopperabo is hard to truly dislike: the story leaves room for the reveal. If you enjoyed this, try our Yuki-onna article, which reads another Kwaidan tale as a story about a promise, and see a different side of Hearn's storytelling.