Nurarihyon

◆ The legend

A yokai in the form of an old man in a kimono, with the back of his head bulging out. He appears in Edo-period yokai scrolls and in Toriyama Sekien's Gazu Hyakki Yagyo. Yet the old pictures come with almost no explanation, so where he appears and what he does has never been clear. From the sound of his name alone, people have imagined him as someone slippery and impossible to pin down.

The image many people know today, of an old man who slips into your house on a busy evening and makes himself at home, or of the "supreme commander of the yokai," is a personality given to him mainly in modern times, especially in yokai books from the Showa era (1926 to 1989) onward. It's best thought of not as an old legend, but as an image later people built up from a picture and a name. Perhaps it's precisely because nothing was explained that he has stirred so many imaginations.