Ayakashi

Also Known As: (あやかし / アヤカシ), a collective name for uncanny happenings at sea; the Noh mask of the same name is written 怪士
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: It arrives at sea as fire, illusion, ghost or serpent, and fouls a ship’s course, its light, its buoyancy or its crew’s nerve.
Role in Mythos: It is the name Japanese sailors gave to whatever supernatural thing went wrong on the water, from the lights over the waves to the returning drowned.
Relation to Humans: It hunts working sailors and fishermen after dark, and in its commonest form it is the dead of their own trade coming back for company. Every recorded encounter turns on a practical remedy carried out fast, which is part of why the stories were worth repeating aboard.

Off the Nagato coast the fires came first. Fishermen working the night water watched them lift out of the black and hang there, and then a ship would pass running hard against the wind with its shape all wrong. Some nights a vessel lit up like a festival lantern stand would come on fast, close enough to hail, and then stop being anywhere at all. Men who had grown up on that water did not need to ask what it was. They said the word and kept their hands busy.

Ayakashi is not the name of a creature. It is the name sailors gave to whatever had gone wrong. Along the Nagasaki coast it meant the strange fires on the sea. In Yamaguchi and Saga it meant the funayūrei, the ghosts of the drowned who come alongside and take a boat down with them. In the western seas the explanation ran the same way wherever you asked: these are people who died out here, and they are looking for company.

On Tsushima they called it the ayakashi fire. It shows up at dusk along the shore, low and steady, and inside the light there seems to be a child walking. Further out it does something worse. The fire swells and hardens into a mountain standing across the bow where no mountain has any business being, and a helmsman who tries to go around it will be going around it all night. The islanders’ remedy is the kind of advice that only sounds brave afterwards: put the helm over and drive straight at it. The mountain goes out like a blown lamp.

The picture most people carry of the ayakashi came from a print. In 1781 Toriyama Sekien put one into *Konjaku Hyakki Shūi*, and what he drew was an enormous sea serpent rearing over a moored ship, its body running off the edge of the page in both directions. His caption is stranger than his picture. On the seas of the western provinces, he wrote, while a ship lies at anchor, a long thing may come over the ship and not be finished with it for two or three days. The oil that comes out of it is prodigious. If the crew put their whole strength into bailing that oil dry, no harm is done; if they do not, the ship sinks. This, he ends, is an ayakashi having fastened on. That last line matters. It treats ayakashi not as an animal but as a condition, something a ship catches.

The creature in the print is generally reckoned to be somebody else’s. Tsumura Sōan’s *Tankai* records the ikuchi off Hitachi, the coast of present-day Ibaraki: a fish of impossible length, several hundred *jō*, and a hundred *jō* is a third of a kilometre. It is only ever seen after dark. It climbs the hull and takes an hour or two to finish passing, and it leaves the planking running with a sticky oil like *funori* glue, so that a man cannot get forward or back without going down on the deck. Negishi Yasumori set down a version too, under the name ikuji, eel-coloured and long, catching on a bow in the western or southern seas and working there for two or three days. Sekien appears to have drawn that animal and filed it under the wrong word.

The Edo collection *Kaidan Oi no Tsue* keeps a smaller, meaner story. A sailor went ashore for water at Daitōzaki in Chōsei, on the Chiba coast, and found a beautiful woman drawing at a well. She shared it with him and he carried it back aboard pleased with himself. His captain heard him out and told him there was no well on that headland, that a man had once gone ashore for water there and never returned, and that the woman was an ayakashi. They got the boat off in a hurry. She came after it through the water and set her teeth into the hull, and it took an oar swung hard to knock her loose.

At the other end of the register the word did plain, unglamorous work. A remora fixed to a hull was thought to hold a ship exactly where it sat, so the fish itself got called an ayakashi. The same name therefore covered a light, a false mountain, a woman at a well, a kilometre of serpent and a hand-sized fish with a sucker on its head. There is no one ayakashi.

The word travelled inland as well. In the Noh theatre, ayakashi names a mask: hollowed eye sockets, cheekbones standing out hard under the skin, a mouth that gives nothing away. It is worn for the ghosts of warriors and for male gods arriving from elsewhere, and it is a startlingly quiet face for the job.

That refusal to settle into one shape is the nearest thing the word has to a body. Sekien gave it scales and a wet black length. Tsushima gave it a glow with a child’s outline moving in it. Chiba gave it a face worth going ashore for. The records do not pretend these are one animal seen from different angles. They are different things happening in the same place, and it is the place that names them.

What an ayakashi can do follows from that. It works on the parts of a voyage a crew cannot control: the wind, the light, the horizon, the water under the keel. It puts fires out, and one Nagato account has an umibōzu coming for the kagari basket burning at the bow, the fisherman answering by hurling the whole blazing basket at it. It shows land where there is none and hides the land that is there. It weighs a boat down with grease or pins it still with a fish. And when it comes as the drowned, it wants what the drowned in these waters are always said to want, which is not revenge but company.

Its limits are just as practical, and they are the reason any of these stories have a teller. Bail hard enough and the oil never sinks you. Steer into the mountain and there is no mountain. Swing the oar and the woman lets go. Nearly every ayakashi encounter that got written down ends with somebody doing the obvious physical thing at the right moment, which makes the tales less horror than drill. The fires only come at night. The dead only get you if you slow down for them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an ayakashi?

Ayakashi is a Japanese blanket term for supernatural trouble at sea rather than the name of a single creature. On the Nagasaki coast it meant the strange fires seen over the water; in Yamaguchi and Saga it meant the funayūrei, the ghosts of people who had drowned. The same word also covered a giant serpent, a woman at a well and a remora stuck to a hull.

What does the ayakashi in Toriyama Sekien’s print do?

Sekien’s *Konjaku Hyakki Shūi* of 1781 shows an enormous sea serpent crossing a ship anchored in the western seas, taking two or three days to finish passing over it. It sheds huge quantities of oil, and the caption states that a crew who bail all of it out come to no harm, while a crew who fail to will sink. The creature he drew is usually identified as the ikuchi, recorded separately off the Hitachi coast.

How do you survive an ayakashi?

By direct physical action, according to the records. Bail the oil out of the boat before it settles, drive straight at the false mountain instead of steering around it, and strike the woman clinging to the hull with an oar. The remedies are deliberately ordinary, which is what makes them memorable aboard a working ship.

Is the ayakashi the same as the funayūrei?

In some regions, yes. Sailors in Yamaguchi and Saga used ayakashi as a name for the funayūrei, the drowned dead who come alongside to sink a boat and take its crew with them. Elsewhere ayakashi meant something else entirely, so the two terms overlap rather than match.

Why is the ayakashi associated with fire?

On the Nagasaki coast and on Tsushima, ayakashi named the mysterious lights seen over the sea. The Tsushima version appears at dusk near the shore with what looks like a child walking inside the flame, and out in open water it can swell into a mountain that blocks a ship’s course until the helmsman rams it.