Aoandon

Also Known As: 青行燈 or 青行灯, “blue andon”, after the paper-shaded oil lamp called an andon
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: The aoandon is the presence that comes when a blue-shaded lamp gutters, flares and sets the shadows shaking at a night of ghost stories.
Role in Mythos: It gives a face to the old warning attached to the hyakumonogatari, the gathering of a hundred strange tales, that talk of demons after dark brings the uncanny into the room.
Relation to Humans: The aoandon belongs to people who invite it, the groups who sat up telling ghost stories around a lamp covered in blue paper. Toriyama Sekien’s caption names no victim and no remedy, only the advice not to speak of demons in the dark of night.

The lamp is the first thing to change. An andon is a small oil lamp inside a frame of paper, and on the nights in question the paper was blue. By the time the telling is nearly done most of the wicks have been pulled from the oil, the flame has shrunk to a bead, and the blue shade gives the faces around it the colour of drowned men. Then the light dies down, catches again and flares, and every shadow in the room jumps. That, according to the one man who named it, is when the aoandon comes.

That man was the painter Toriyama Sekien, and the whole record of the aoandon as a being is a single page in his picture book *Konjaku Hyakki Shūi*, printed in 1781. The page is a woodblock picture with a few lines of text. The text says that when the lamp is about to go out and then grows bright again, and the shadows waver and the room turns dark, a thing called the aoandon is said to appear. It adds that since old times people who hold a hyakumonogatari have covered their andon in blue paper. It ends with a warning: do not talk of demons in the dark of night, for talk of demons and strangeness comes. No earlier source names the aoandon. No folk tale gives it a victim, a home or a history.

What Sekien was drawing on is much better attested. The hyakumonogatari, the “hundred tales”, was an Edo-period gathering at which friends told ghost stories one after another, putting out a light after each. Its rules are set down in *Otogibōko*, a collection of strange stories by the writer Asai Ryōi published in 1666. The last chapter of that book, whose title means “Speak of the strange and the strange arrives”, lays out the procedure. Choose a night without a moon. Light an andon papered in blue. Set a hundred wicks in the oil, and draw one out at the end of each story. The room darkens by degrees, the colour of the blue paper shifts, and the whole place grows gradually uncanny.

Asai then tells what happened to five people who followed those rules one winter night. They had reached sixty or seventy stories when lights like fireflies began to drift outside. The lights gathered into a single bright ball, burst, and became a white mass about five feet across that struck the ceiling and dropped to the floor with a crash. All five fainted. They came round unhurt, and Asai closed his book on the spot, short of a hundred tales, with a proverb: do not speak of people by daylight, do not speak of demons by night, for speak of demons and the strange arrives. The literature scholar Ōhashi Takayuki traces that line to a Tang-dynasty Chinese collection attributed to Liu Zongyuan. Sekien’s own warning repeats it almost word for word, a century later.

A second seventeenth-century book, Ogita Ansei’s *Tonoigusa*, has young men near the end of their hundred tales when a huge hand spreads its fingers across the ceiling. One of them draws his sword and cuts at it. What falls is the leg of a spider, about three sun long, a little over the length of a finger. Neither Asai nor Ogita calls what visited their storytellers an aoandon. That name is Sekien’s.

His picture is the only body the aoandon has ever had. She stands behind a lantern, her long black hair hanging loose, two horns rising from her head, her teeth blackened, her clothing white. The print is black ink on paper, so the blue lives only in her name.

Many later retellings say flatly that the aoandon appears when the hundredth story ends and the last light goes out. Sekien’s caption does not say that. It ties her to the flicker of a dying flame, a moment that can come at any point in the night. Some Japanese writers go further and suggest that aoandon was never meant as the name of one creature at all, but as a label for whatever strangeness a hundred tales might bring. The single page will bear either reading, and nothing else exists to settle it.

Her power, such as it is, is the power of the rule she enforces. The storytellers make the conditions themselves: the moonless night, the blue paper, the shrinking light, the talk of demons. She is simply what those conditions produce. Her limit is the same rule turned around. Stop before the last tale, as Asai did, or keep demons out of the conversation after dark, and there is nothing in the record to suggest she comes at all.

She has one modern afterlife worth mentioning. In 2023 marine biologists working in Japan named a newly described bioluminescent worm *Polycirrus aoandon*, for the bluish-violet light it gives off in the dark.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an aoandon?

An aoandon is a Japanese yokai drawn by the painter Toriyama Sekien in his 1781 picture book *Konjaku Hyakki Shūi*. Its name means “blue andon”, after the blue-papered oil lamps used at hyakumonogatari ghost-story gatherings, and Sekien says it may appear when such a lamp flickers and the shadows waver.

What does the aoandon look like?

In Sekien’s woodblock picture the aoandon is a woman with long loose black hair, two horns, blackened teeth and white clothing, standing behind a paper lantern. This single picture is the only description of the aoandon that exists.

What is the connection between the aoandon and hyakumonogatari?

Hyakumonogatari was an Edo-period gathering where people told a hundred ghost stories and put out a light after each one. Its rules, recorded in Asai Ryōi’s *Otogibōko* (1666), called for an andon covered in blue paper, and Sekien named the aoandon after that lamp.

Does the aoandon appear after the hundredth ghost story?

Many modern retellings say so, but Sekien’s original caption does not. It says the aoandon may appear when the lamp is about to go out and then flares bright, and it warns against talking of demons in the dark of night.

Is the aoandon a traditional folklore creature?

The being named aoandon traces to one source, Toriyama Sekien’s 1781 picture book. The ghost-story custom and the belief that telling tales of the strange summons the strange are older and well recorded, going back at least to *Otogibōko* in 1666.