Akaname

Also Known As: 垢嘗, “grime-licker”; earlier Akaneburi, 垢ねぶり, with the same meaning
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: A creature that feeds on the scum and dirt left behind by bathers, and that is said to be born out of that same filth.
Role in Mythos: The akaname is one of the house-haunting yokai of Edo-period Japan, first written down as the akaneburi of old bathhouses in 1686 and given its lasting picture by Toriyama Sekien in 1776.
Relation to Humans: In the older accounts it lives off what people leave behind and lurks in bathhouses and ruined houses that nobody keeps up. Later writers turned it into a reason to scrub the tub, and one 1780 compilation tells a darker version in which it licks a man down to his bones.

The bathhouse is closed for the night. The water in the tub has gone cold and grey, a skin of scum rides on its surface, and the wooden boards smell of damp and old soap. Something small crouches at the edge of the tub on clawed feet. Its tongue comes out, and keeps coming, and it begins to lick.

That is nearly the whole of the akaname, and the picture is older than the story told about it now. The name means “grime-licker.” Aka is the grey film of dead skin, sweat and dirt that bathers leave behind, and name comes from the verb to lick. An earlier form of the word, akaneburi, means exactly the same thing.

The creature first appears in writing in 1686, in Kokon Hyaku Monogatari Hyōban, a book built from the hundred-tales gatherings of the Kyoto scholar Yamaoka Genrin. The hundred-tales game was a fashionable Edo pastime: a company gathered after dark, a hundred lamp wicks were lit, and one was put out at the end of each strange story, so that the room grew darker with every tale until, by repute, something real would come when the last flame died. Genrin’s sessions had a habit of taking the stories apart as well as telling them, and his book gives the akaneburi a natural history rather than a legend. It lives in old bathhouses, the book says, and lurks in houses gone to ruin. It is born from the settled air of dust and grime itself, and it eats what it was born from, the way a fish born in water drinks water and lice that hatch in filth feed on filth. The explanation is tidy, a little clinical, and faintly revolting.

Ninety years later the painter Toriyama Sekien gave the creature the face the world still knows. His 1776 bestiary Gazu Hyakki Yagyō, the first of his four illustrated catalogues of yokai, puts the akaname in its opening volume among mountain goblins, river imps and shape-shifting animals. The plate shows a scruffy child with cropped, shaggy hair and hooked claws on its feet, standing beside a bathhouse with a long tongue stretched out. Sekien wrote nothing underneath it. There is no caption, no story and no warning, just the name and the drawing.

That silence has done a great deal of work since. Because Sekien left the picture unexplained, most of what is repeated about the akaname today was filled in afterwards. Twentieth-century yokai books of the Shōwa and Heisei years read it the same way Genrin read the akaneburi: a thing that slips into neglected bathrooms at night and licks the grime from tubs and floors. In those tellings it does no direct harm. It does not need to. The thought of that tongue on the same boards a bather stands on barefoot is enough to send a household for the scrubbing brush, and the moral writes itself. Some writers take the word aka further, into the older Buddhist sense of defilement, so that the dirt on the tub stands for a dirt on the spirit. Others guess from the sound of the name, which happens to echo the word for red, that the creature must have a red face or red skin. No Edo source says so.

Other Edo artists did not agree on its look either. A board game of yokai designed by Utagawa Yoshikazu in 1858 gave it an unsettling blue-black skin. And one 1780 natural-history compilation, Kanda Genki’s Nittō Honzō Zusan, which illustrated the akaneburi in its twelfth volume, carried a far nastier version. There the creature does not always come as a child. It may appear as a beautiful woman, and what it licks is not scum but blood and flesh, until nothing is left but bones. The book tells of a man who frequented a hot spring in the province of Harima and died that way, stripped to a skeleton. It is a lone account, and it sits oddly against everything else in the record, but it is there.

Taken together, the sources describe a small thing and a narrow one. Its only real power is to exist wherever cleaning has stopped, and to eat. It has no recorded weapon, no curse and no fixed rule for driving it out. Its weakness follows directly from what it is. A creature made of accumulated filth and fed on it has nothing to live on in a clean bath, which is why every later writer who told the story ended it with someone scrubbing. The one exception is the Harima tale, where the creature turns predator, and even there the setting is the bath.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an akaname?

An akaname is a Japanese yokai that licks the grime and scum left in bathhouses and dirty bathrooms. Its name means “grime-licker.” It is best known from Toriyama Sekien’s 1776 yokai catalogue Gazu Hyakki Yagyō.

Is the akaname dangerous?

In most accounts the akaname is not dangerous and does no direct harm to people. It simply licks the dirt from neglected baths at night. One 1780 compilation, Kanda Genki’s Nittō Honzō Zusan, is the exception, describing a version that licks a man’s flesh until only his bones remain.

Where does the akaname story come from?

The earliest written account is the akaneburi in Kokon Hyaku Monogatari Hyōban, a 1686 book based on the ghost-story gatherings of the scholar Yamaoka Genrin. That book says the creature lives in old bathhouses and ruined houses and is born from accumulated grime. Toriyama Sekien later drew it in 1776 under the name akaname.

What did Toriyama Sekien say about the akaname?

Toriyama Sekien said nothing about the akaname in words. His 1776 plate shows only the name and a picture of a shaggy-haired child with clawed feet and a long tongue beside a bathhouse. Most modern explanations of the akaname were added by later writers.

Why would people keep their bathrooms clean because of the akaname?

Later retellings describe the akaname as coming only to baths where grime has built up, so a clean bath gives it nothing to eat. Twentieth-century yokai books use the creature as a reason to scrub the tub. Some writers also link its name to the Buddhist idea of spiritual defilement.