Jikininki

Also Known As: 食人鬼, “human-eating demon”; the same characters are read shokujinki in ordinary modern Japanese
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology, Buddhist Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Undead/Cursed Beings
Mythical Attributes: A priest reborn immediately after death into a state in which he must devour every corpse left in his district, along with the offerings set out beside it.
Role in Mythos: It carries the Buddhist doctrine of karmic rebirth to its most literal conclusion, turning a man who fed off the dead for a living into a thing that feeds off them in fact.
Relation to Humans: It takes only the unattended dead, never the living, and the one person recorded as meeting it was held motionless and unharmed while it fed. It knows what it is, and what it wants from the living is a funeral rite said on its own behalf.

The village emptied before midnight. Forty or fifty people had gathered at the headman’s house to sit with the dead man, and then every one of them walked out and took the road three miles over the hills to the next village, because the rule where they lived was that nobody remains in a place where a corpse is lying. They left the body, a small Buddhist lamp burning beside it, the food offerings laid out, and one stranger who had asked to stay. That stranger is the reason anyone has ever heard of the jikininki. The whole record of the creature is a single short story, “Jikininki,” printed in Lafcadio Hearn’s *Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things* in 1904. Hearn’s preface says only that most of the book was taken from old Japanese books, and names five of them together, the *Yasō-Kidan*, the *Bukkyō-Hyakkwa-Zenshō*, the *Kokon-Chomonshū*, the *Tama-Sudaré* and the *Hyaku-Monogatari*. He never says which one gave him this one.

The stranger was a Zen priest named Musō Kokushi, and he was there by accident. He had lost his road in the mountains of Mino with the light going, and had climbed toward a small ruined hermitage on a hilltop still catching the last of the sun, where an aged priest refused him a bed harshly and sent him down into the valley instead. So he ended the day sitting up alone with another man’s father. He recited the service, performed the rites, and settled into meditation while the emptied village made no sound at all. Then, at the deepest part of the night, something came in. Hearn gives it four words: a Shape, vague and vast. Musō found he could not move or speak. The Shape lifted the corpse as though it had hands and ate it more quickly than a cat eats a rat, beginning at the head and taking everything, the hair and the bones and even the shroud. Then it turned to the offerings and ate those, and went out as quietly as it had arrived.

Nobody was surprised in the morning. The dead man’s son said only that this agreed with what had been said about the matter since ancient time, and that whenever the village kept its rule, the body and the offerings were always gone when the people came home. Musō asked whether the priest up on the hill ever performed their funerals. What priest, the young man said. There was no hermitage on that hill and no priest anywhere near, and there had not been a resident priest in the district for generations. Musō went back up the hill anyway. The old man let him in this time, bowed to the floor in front of him and said, three times over, that he was ashamed. Not for refusing shelter. He was ashamed that he had been seen in his real shape.

Then he explained himself, and that explanation is everything the tradition says about how such a thing is made. He had once been the only priest for many leagues, so the mountain dead were carried up to him, sometimes from a long way off, for the proper words. He said the words. But he performed the rites purely as a matter of business, thinking of the food and the clothing his profession earned him and of nothing else, and for that selfish impiety he was reborn the instant he died into the state of a jikininki, obliged from then on to eat every person who died in that district. He asked Musō for a segaki, the rite that feeds the hungry ghosts. The moment he finished asking, he was gone, and the hermitage with him, and Musō was kneeling in high grass beside an old moss-grown go-rin-ishi that looked like the grave of a priest. The story does not say the rite was ever performed.

Almost everything else now attached to these creatures comes from somewhere other than the record. Nothing anywhere describes a jikininki’s face. There are no sharpened teeth, no features curdling into something monstrous as a curse deepens, no human disguise worn by daylight and shed after dark; the hermit simply looks like an old priest, and the thing in the death room has no body at all. No second jikininki is named. No second story exists. Nobody counts them, locates them, or says what happens to one that is never prayed for.

The doctrine the hermit reasons from, on the other hand, is firm ground, and it is worth separating from him. The Sanskrit *preta* originally meant the spirit of a person between death and becoming an ancestor, a thing that had to be fed; Buddhism narrowed it to the dead tormented by hunger and thirst, and Chinese translators rendered it *gaki*, hungry ghost. The *Shōbō nenjo kyō* devotes two long chapters to them: the gaki world lies beneath the earth, there are gaki who live down there and gaki who live unseen among human beings, miserliness and envy are what send you to join them, and thirty-six varieties are set out one after another according to what each did. Out of the same body of scripture came the segaki rite itself, the ceremony of feeding the hungry ghosts that the hermit is asking for.

Run down those thirty-six and the jikininki is not among them. There is a flesh-eating gaki and a gaki that feeds on human vital force, one that lives among the graves eating hot ash, one that takes small children. The corpse-eater as Hearn names him is not on the list. He sits alongside the canonical roster rather than inside it, borrowing its logic, which is a more interesting position than the one usually claimed for him.

Musō, at least, was real. Musō Soseki lived from 1275 to 1351, a Rinzai monk of the Bukkō line who was ordained at nine, turned to Zen at twenty, collected seven national-teacher titles from seven successive courts, founded Tenryū-ji and laid out its garden, and left more than ten thousand disciples behind him. Among the provinces he actually lived in was Mino. The nearest Japanese literary cousin to his encounter is “Aozukin,” in Ueda Akinari’s *Ugetsu Monogatari* of 1776, where a priest of Shimotsuke, undone by grief for a dead acolyte, eats the boy’s body and then goes out at night to open graves; but that priest is alive, he is called an oni, his ruin is love rather than avarice, and he is freed by a Chinese verse and a blow from a staff rather than by a funeral service. Family resemblance, not descent.

What the jikininki can do follows exactly from what it is. It holds a witness fast without touching him. It passes for a living priest, gives directions, keeps a house on a hill that is not there. It eats a whole body, bones included, in less time than it takes to describe. And every one of those powers is also the shape of its cage: it cannot refuse a corpse, it cannot leave its district, it cannot pray itself out, and it is entirely aware of all three. The only exit runs through somebody else’s compassion, offered in the form of the rite it once said for money.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a jikininki?

A jikininki is a corpse-eating spirit of Japanese Buddhist folklore, described as a priest reborn after death into a state in which he must devour the bodies of everyone who dies in his district. The creature is known from one story, “Jikininki,” in Lafcadio Hearn’s collection *Kwaidan*, published in 1904.

How does someone become a jikininki?

In the only account that exists, a country priest performed funeral rites as a matter of business, caring about the food and clothing they earned him rather than the dead he was burying. He was reborn as a jikininki immediately upon his own death. No other cause is recorded for any other case, because no other case is recorded.

What does a jikininki look like?

No source describes one. In Hearn’s story the creature that enters the death room is called only “a Shape, vague and vast,” which lifts the corpse as though it had hands and eats it faster than a cat eats a rat. The sharpened teeth and rotting face often attributed to jikininki do not appear in the record.

Is a jikininki the same as a gaki?

Not quite. The jikininki explains himself in the language of the gaki, the hungry ghosts of Buddhist teaching, and asks for the segaki rite performed on their behalf. But the *Shōbō nenjo kyō*, which sets out thirty-six kinds of gaki, does not include him; the closest entries are a flesh-eating gaki and one that feeds on human vital force.

How is a jikininki freed?

By a segaki, the Buddhist ceremony of feeding the hungry ghosts, performed for it by someone else. The jikininki cannot release itself, which is why the one in the story begs a passing Zen priest to say the rite. Hearn’s text ends without saying whether it was ever said.