Ningyo

◆ The legend

Say "mermaid" in the West, and you picture a beautiful young woman from the waist up and a fish from the waist down. But in Japan's old tales and pictures, the ningyo (literally "human fish") is something stranger: a fish's body with a human face, sometimes with long hair growing around that face. Stories are told in many places of such creatures caught in fishermen's nets or washed up on the shore.

A ningyo appearing was sometimes taken as a sign that something bad was about to happen. Yet it was also said that eating its flesh would keep you from growing old, and in Wakasa, in today's Fukui Prefecture, there is the legend of Yao Bikuni, a nun who ate ningyo flesh and lived for eight hundred years. Frightening, or a blessing? The Japanese ningyo has never quite been one or the other, and that is what makes it so mysterious.