What Is a Tsurube? The Yokai Named After a Well Bucket

Hear the name tsurube-otoshi today, and few people will picture what a tsurube actually is. It's the bucket used to draw water from a well. This yokai takes its name straight from the movement of an everyday tool. Picture a life lived around a well, and the fright of the tsurube-otoshi suddenly feels much closer to home.

A tsurube is a well bucket

Before running water, many homes and villages drew their water from wells, and the tool for the job was the tsurube. You tied a bucket to the end of a rope, lowered it into the well, let it fill, and hauled it back up.

A common setup put a pulley above the well, with a bucket on each end of the rope, so that lowering one raised the other. There was also the "hane-tsurube," a bucket hung from the end of a long pole that worked like a lever.

Whatever the setup, when you lowered the bucket, you only had to loosen your grip and it dropped straight down, fast. That quick, straight fall is said to be where the tsurube-otoshi, the "dropping well bucket," gets its name.

"An autumn sunset is a tsurube-otoshi"

The same motion lives on in a phrase that has nothing to do with yokai. "Aki no hi wa tsurube-otoshi" — "the autumn sun is a dropping well bucket." It's an old saying meaning that in autumn, once the sun begins to set, darkness falls in no time.

Like a bucket plunging into a well, the setting sun slips behind the hills all at once. For people back then, the speed of a falling tsurube was something they saw every day and understood at a glance. Anyone who heard the yokai's name would surely have pictured it at once: something coming down from above, suddenly, with a thud.

A home in the treetops

The tsurube-otoshi is said to lurk in big trees standing at the edge of a village or beside a mountain path. By day such a tree gives welcome shade, but at night its upper branches are pitch black, and nothing can be seen up there.

Pass underneath, and a huge head comes crashing down. Tales say it startles passersby, or grabs them and hauls them up, then slips back up into the tree. In some areas, it's said, the tsurube-otoshi is described not as a head but as something like a ball of fire.

High up in tall trees has long been thought of as a place beyond human eyes, where strange things might dwell. Perhaps this yokai was born from the unease of people walking dark roads at night, glancing up over their heads.

Not the same as the rokurokubi

When people think of head yokai, many recall the rokurokubi. But the two are completely different yokai.

The rokurokubi lives as an ordinary person by day; at night, its neck stretches out, or its head comes loose and flies off. It starts out as a human. The tsurube-otoshi, on the other hand, is told of as the head itself, hiding up in a tree and dropping down from above. In pictures, too, it is usually shown as a giant head and nothing more, with wild, tangled hair.

The rokurokubi, whose neck stretches out, and the tsurube-otoshi, whose head drops down: you might say their scares run in different directions, one sideways and one straight down. You'll find the tsurube-otoshi's legend on its Yokaipedia page.