Chōchinobake

An old man walked up to the village shrine at night because nobody else would. Something had been appearing there after dark, people said, and the path had gone quiet. When he reached the shrine his skin began to prickle and itch until he could not hold still, and he started to dance, calling into the dark: what kind of ghost am I, what kind of ghost are you? A voice came back from somewhere behind the trees. I am the lantern ghost, it said. I am the lantern ghost. Out it came, and the two of them danced together until the old man had had enough, and he went home saying he would be back tomorrow night.

He was. So was the lantern. On the second evening he began to wonder why the thing kept turning up, and he went poking around the shrine grounds until he found what he was looking for: an old chōchin, its paper eaten through by insects, left where nobody would think about it again. He understood then that it wanted to be dealt with, so he buried it properly. Nothing appeared the following night, or any night after. The tale is told in the Okitama dialect of Yamagata, and it ends with the plainest moral a ghost story can carry, which is that you do not fling a thing into a corner just because it has got old.

That is the whole of the creature’s temperament in one story. A chōchin is a collapsible lantern of split bamboo hooped inside washi paper, sometimes silk, with a candle seated in the middle and a wooden cap at either end, and it folds flat like a concertina when you are done with it. The chōchinobake keeps every part of that body. The transformation is damage given a face. The mouth is a tear running the length of a rib, the tongue spills out of it long and red, and the eyes are two pale lumps forced out of the paper above. Now and then one grows stubby arms, or legs, or a torso and a pair of wings, and goes hopping across the boards. Mostly it just hangs there and pulls a face.

Behind it stands one of the tidier ideas in Japanese belief. A Muromachi companion tale called the Tsukumogami ki, the record of tool spectres, sets out the rule: containers, tools and instruments that have been in service for close to a hundred years receive souls. Noriko Reider, who translated and studied the text, reads it as Shingon Buddhist doctrine smuggled inside an entertainment, using a belief people already held to teach something the priests wanted taught. The creatures it produced are the tsukumogami, and they are a crowded household. Sandals do it. Umbrellas do it. Lutes, kotos, tea kettles, sutra scrolls and folding screens all do it. A lantern lit and trimmed and carried out through a century of festivals and funerals is as good a candidate as any of them.

The strange part is how little the chōchinobake has to show for its fame. Murakami Kenji, compiling his encyclopedia of yōkai, files it among the creatures that exist only in pictures, and the phrase has stuck to it ever since. That is very nearly right, though the Yamagata dance shows the shelf is not bare. What the classification really means is that a monster everyone in Japan can draw from memory has almost no oral tradition underneath it, and that the pictures came first.

Those pictures start late. The old picture scrolls of the night parade of tools, the ones the Muromachi painters filled with animated koto and kettles, contain no lantern anywhere. The lantern arrives with the Edo period. When Toriyama Sekien closed his four-book survey of Japanese monsters in 1784 with a volume devoted almost entirely to tool spirits, he included a lantern lashed to a bamboo pole, its torn paper drooping open over a path between rice fields, and he called it burabura. His caption wonders aloud whether the thing might not be a lantern at all but foxfire out over the paddies, which leaves the drawing balanced between two different kinds of haunting. Whether burabura is a chōchinobake or merely its nearest relative has never been settled.

What is certain is where the creature actually lived, which is in the hands of children. It appears in cheap illustrated booklets, in printed toy sheets, and above all in obake karuta, the monster card decks played through the Edo period and on into the twentieth century, drawn sometimes as a squat bucket shape and sometimes as a long cylinder. Meiji and Taishō toymakers kept it. Summer haunted-house attractions kept it. Somewhere in that long run it stopped being a fright and became a face, the thing that swings down at a guest in a dark entryway and makes them drop the tray they are carrying, to general delight.

There is one place where a lantern turns genuinely dangerous, and it does not belong to the tool spirits at all. Tsuruya Nanboku IV staged Tōkaidō Yotsuya Kaidan at the Nakamuraza in Edo in 1825. In it a woman called Oiwa is scarred beyond recognition by a poison sent to her disguised as face cream, worked up by the household of the young woman who wants her husband; realising what has been done to her, she snatches up a sword, and dies on its point while trying to get past the man sent to shame her, cursing her husband Iemon as she bleeds. She comes back. The play’s most celebrated effect, the chōchin-nuke or lantern escape, brings her ruined face pushing out through the paper of a lantern Iemon is trying to light, and the theatres of the period had a second lantern with a human face in them that same year.

Hokusai fixed that image for good around 1831. His Oiwa, from the unfinished series of a hundred ghost stories, is a pale head emerging from a worn lantern, the left eye dragged down her cheek, the whole thing printed in the new imported Prussian blue that his first audiences read as the colour of death; the writing on the lantern asks the viewer to pray for her soul. Kuniyoshi drew her too, still lantern-headed, coming for Iemon through the snakes at Hebiyama. None of this makes her a tsukumogami. Oiwa is an onryō, a grudge with a face, and the lantern is only the surface she has come through. Modern popular writing sometimes turns that round and claims the vengeful dead disguise themselves as harmless lantern spirits, which is a good line and has nothing older behind it. In the same spirit, the cartoonist Mizuki Shigeru, who did more than anyone to fix the modern look of these creatures, gave the chōchinobake the power to suck out a person’s soul without saying where he found it. Nobody has found it since. The lanterns that do turn up in genuine local folklore are usually not objects at all but drifting lights, chōchinbi, out at the edge of a field.

Its powers, then, are exactly as large as its ambitions. It moves when nothing should be moving it, hangs where it likes, cackles, rolls an enormous eye, and startles. Its limits are stitched into its materials. It is paper, bamboo and a stub of candle, tied to one lantern and to the small warm circle that lantern throws, and it cannot follow anyone beyond the edge of its own light. Insects get into it. Rain gets into it. A doused flame ends the performance, and so, in the Yamagata telling, does a shovel and a decent word said over the hole. The most frightening thing at the gate is something you could put out with a cup of water, which may be exactly why Edo went on drawing it long after it had stopped being afraid.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Chōchinobake?

A Chōchinobake is the paper lantern ghost of Japanese folklore, one of the tsukumogami or tool spirits. It is an aged chōchin lantern come to life, its paper split along a bamboo rib into a wide mouth with a lolling tongue and one or two eyes bulging out above the tear.

How does a Chōchinobake come to be?

A Chōchinobake forms when a paper lantern grows very old in service. The Muromachi tale Tsukumogami ki sets the threshold at close to a hundred years, after which containers, tools and instruments receive souls of their own and can wake as tsukumogami.

Is the Chōchinobake dangerous?

No older account records a Chōchinobake harming anyone. It exists to startle, and it cackles and rolls its tongue and eyes at people in the house rather than hurting them. The soul-stealing ability attached to it in modern comics comes from the cartoonist Mizuki Shigeru and has no earlier source behind it.

Why does the Chōchinobake have so few legends?

The Chōchinobake spread through pictures rather than through storytelling, which is why the folklorist Murakami Kenji groups it with the yōkai that exist only in pictures. It reached most people through Edo illustrated booklets, printed toy sheets and obake karuta monster card decks. One full folktale does survive, from Yamagata, in which a lantern ghost dances with an old man at a village shrine until he finds the worm-eaten lantern behind it and buries it properly.

What is the connection between the Chōchinobake and Oiwa?

Oiwa is the vengeful ghost of the 1825 kabuki play Tōkaidō Yotsuya Kaidan, whose disfigured face pushes out through a paper lantern in the play’s famous chōchin-nuke effect and in Hokusai’s print of about 1831. She is an onryō rather than a tool spirit, so the lantern is a surface she comes through rather than a body she has grown into, but hers is by far the most frightening use ever made of the haunted-lantern image.

Related Entries

Tsukumogami, Kasa-obake, Bakezōri, Biwa-bokuboku, Kyōrinrin, Ichiren-bōzu, Ittan-momen, Tōfu-kozō, Yōkai, Obake, Oiwa, Onryō, Yūrei, Onibi, Hitodama