Kokakuchō

Also Known As: 姑獲鳥; Chinese guhuoniao, “wench bird”; also ubumedori, rumuniao 乳母鳥 “wet-nurse bird”, yexing younü 夜行遊女 “night-roaming girl”, guiniao 鬼鳥 “demon bird”
Region/Culture: East Asia (China, and Japan by way of Chinese texts)
Mythos: Chinese Mythology, Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A night-flying bird that becomes a woman by shedding its feather garment, and that marks sleeping infants with a drop of its blood to sicken and claim them.
Role in Mythos: The transformed spirit of a woman who died in childbirth, blamed for infant wasting illness and for children who vanish in the night.
Relation to Humans: Households in old Jingzhou were warned never to leave a child’s clothes hanging out after dark, because the bird would mark the garment and the child who wore it would fall ill. In the Japanese version it approaches travellers as a woman with a baby in her arms and asks them to hold it, and the ones who run away are the ones who suffer.

The bird goes over the roof after midnight and nobody hears it. The thatch takes a single drop of something warm, and in the morning it is a rust-coloured spot on a child’s sleeve, no bigger than a grain of rice, and easy to take for nothing at all. Then the child stops eating. Within a few weeks there is a small body in a small coffin, and in old Jingzhou everyone knew whose fault it was.

The guhuoniao, which Japan later read with the same characters as kokakuchō, is the oldest kind of terror dressed as an ornithological fact. It appears in the Xuan Zhong Ji, a record of strange things attributed to the Jin scholar Guo Pu in the third or fourth century, where the essentials are already fixed: the bird flies by night and hides by day, it can take off its plumage and stand up as a woman, and it takes human lives. Later writers added detail without ever softening it. The Tang collector Duan Chengshi noted in his Youyang zazu that some said it was a woman who died in childbirth, changed into a bird. Li Shizhen, compiling the Bencao gangmu in the sixteenth century, set it down as a demon-spirit and gave it the anatomy that makes it unforgettable: a bird with a pair of breasts on its chest, still there under the feathers, still full.

That is the horror of the thing. It is not a predator. It is a mother with nowhere to put her milk.

The mechanism is precise, which is why it lasted. The bird has no children of its own because childbirth killed her and the child with her, so it takes other people’s. It flies at night over the houses and drips a spot of blood onto an infant, or onto the clothes an infant will wear, and the mark takes. The child sickens with what the medical texts call wugugan, the “innocent’s wasting”, a slow decline into convulsions and thinness that carried off children by the score in the wet river country of the middle Yangtze. Chen Canqi, writing in 739, said the bird drew out both souls, the hun that rises and the po that stays with the body, so that nothing was left to fight. Others said the child was simply carried off and raised as the bird’s own, and that a girl brought up that way became one in her turn. Every version ends the same way for the parents.

What it looked like depended on what it was doing. As a woman she was ordinary, and that was the point, because a woman walking at night is only a woman until she reaches for the coat she left folded on the ground. As a bird she was large, soft-flying, and hard to place. The companion dictionary to the Bencao gangmu files her as a goatsucker, a nightjar, one of those wide-mouthed birds that hunt insects at dusk on wings that make almost no sound. Others heard an owl in the description. Minakata Kumagusu, who spent a long career prodding at exactly this sort of question, pointed out that the mottled barring on the breast of a nocturnal bird can look astonishingly like a pair of paps in bad light, and that the same misreading produced the strix of the Mediterranean, the night bird that Pliny said left milk on the lips of sleeping babies. Two cultures at opposite ends of the world watched the same silhouette cross the same moon and arrived at the same accusation.

Her ancestry is a braid rather than a line. The feather coat comes from the bird-maidens of the Soushenji, women who could be caught and kept if a man hid the plumage they had laid aside. The stolen children come from the nüqi of the Songs of Chu, who takes what is not hers. Somewhere in the early centuries of the common era those strands twisted together with the real and unbearable statistics of childbirth, and the wench bird was the result.

Japan imported her in books rather than in the air. The 1712 encyclopedia Wakan sansai zue copied out the Chinese entry under the characters 姑獲鳥, then added what people in the western provinces actually said. There the ubumedori is a gull-like bird that cries like one, and it comes on a dark night of thin rain with a cold phosphorescent light travelling alongside it. It takes the form of a woman carrying a baby and it asks you, politely, to hold the child for a moment. The compiler, Terashima Ryōan, did not believe a word of the transformation and wrote so plainly: no woman turns into a bird, and this must be some species of bird congealed out of yin poison. He recorded the rest anyway. In Ibaraki they said the same creature would find a child’s clothes left out overnight, judge the child hers, and mark the cloth with milk from her own breasts, which was poison.

Her powers all follow from her grief and are limited by it. She can fly unheard, shed her body for a human one, sicken a child at a distance with a single drop of blood, and pull a soul out of a body without touching it. What she cannot do is get near a child who is not exposed to her. Bring the washing in before dark and the mark has nothing to land on. Take the offered baby in your arms instead of bolting, and the Japanese accounts agree that no harm comes to you at all, because what she wants is not your death but a moment when someone is willing to carry what she could not. The ones who suffer are the ones who run, struck down with shaking chills and a fever that kills. The bird is not defeated by courage exactly. She is answered by it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Kokakuchō?

The Kokakuchō, known in Chinese as the guhuoniao, is a night-flying bird of Chinese folklore said to be the transformed spirit of a woman who died in childbirth. It can remove its feather coat and appear as a human woman, and it preys on infants. Japanese texts adopted both the creature and its Chinese characters, reading them as kokakuchō or ubumedori.

What does the Kokakuchō do to children?

It steals them or sickens them. According to the Bencao gangmu, the bird flies over houses at night and marks an infant with a drop of its blood, causing a wasting illness with convulsions called wugugan, the “innocent’s wasting”. Other accounts say it carries the child off to raise as its own, and that a girl raised this way becomes a guhuoniao herself.

Why should children’s clothes not be left out at night?

Because the bird marks the garment and the mark passes to the child who wears it. This warning appears in the Chinese sources and survives in Japanese regional folklore, where the Ibaraki version of the creature is said to find a child’s clothing hung out to dry after dark, claim the child as hers, and stain the cloth with poisonous milk from her own breasts.

Is the Kokakuchō the same as the ubume?

They are closely related but not identical in origin. The ubume is the Japanese ghost of a woman who died in childbirth, and the Chinese bird-name 姑獲鳥 was borrowed and applied to her during the Edo period, when Chinese and Japanese supernatural categories were being merged. The Chinese guhuoniao is a bird first and a woman second, and it is far more predatory than the Japanese ubume, who usually only wants her infant held.

What real bird is the Kokakuchō supposed to be?

No identification is certain. The dictionary attached to the Bencao gangmu treats it as a goatsucker, meaning a nightjar, and Arthur Waley agreed; other commentators have argued for an owl. Minakata Kumagusu suggested that the barred markings on the chest of a nocturnal bird can resemble a pair of breasts in poor light, which would explain how the legend attached itself to a real species.