Nobusuma

Also Known As: 野衾
Region/Culture: East Asia, Japanese
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A blood-drinking, fire-eating flying yokai that glides silently through the dark on a wide skin membrane, born from a bat that has grown old.
Role in Mythos: It haunts wooded mountain roads at night, snuffing out travelers’ lanterns and dropping onto their faces to drink their blood.
Relation to Humans: It preys on people walking alone after dark, smothering their faces, putting out their lights, and sucking blood from them and from small animals such as cats. Its legend most likely grew from real encounters with nocturnal flying squirrels startled by torchlight, which gave an ordinary animal a monstrous second life.

The lantern gutters once, as though a draft had found it, and then it is simply out. On the mountain road there is no wind. There is only the dark folding back over the place where the small flame had been, the cold smell of pine and wet earth, and somewhere above the branches a dry rattle and a cry like a crow with a bad throat, gaa, gaa, already climbing away into the canopy. A traveler who knows that sound keeps walking and does not look up. The thing that drank his light may come back for more than that.

The nobusuma is a bat that lived too long. In the folklore of Edo-period Japan an ordinary bat, given enough years, stops being ordinary. It thickens, it sharpens, and it takes on the shape and the appetites of a musasabi, the giant flying squirrel that lives in the hollows of mountain trees. The artist Toriyama Sekien set the creature down in his 1779 picture-book of monsters, drawing it as a flying squirrel caught mid-glide with its body spread wide, and his caption is oddly deflating: the nobusuma, he wrote, is nothing but the musasabi. The line between the animal and the monster was always thin here, and the nobusuma lives exactly on it.

Its name gives away its method. Written with the character for a quilt or a length of bedding, nobusuma means something close to wild coverlet, and that is what it does with itself. It falls out of the trees onto a person’s upturned face and opens its gliding membrane flat, so that the leathery skin drops over the eyes and mouth like a blanket thrown in the dark. Blinded, gagged, the victim claws at a warm weight that has fastened to his head. Then it begins to feed. It drinks blood from people and from their animals, cats especially, and when it is not hungry it contents itself with mischief, swooping low to lick the flame off a torch or blow out a lantern before wheeling back up with that ugly two-note cry. It is said to eat fire the way other creatures eat moths.

There is a plainer story underneath. The musasabi and its smaller cousin the momonga have keen night vision and are easily dazzled; a bright torch swung on a dark path can panic a gliding squirrel straight into the person carrying it. Strip the legend away and you are left with a startled animal and a frightened man. But the folklore did not want the plainer story, and it built something stranger on top of the fright, because in Japan a creature’s monstrousness was often just a matter of how old it had grown.

That is why the nobusuma is only a middle stage. The aged bat becomes a nobusuma, and the nobusuma, if it survives long enough, becomes something worse. In some tellings it ripens into the yamachichi, a beast that creeps into houses at night and sucks the breath from sleepers, sometimes drawing out their lives along with it. In others it hardens into the momonjii, a shaggy, bestial old man who roams the wild places and falls upon latecomers and misbehaving children. The nobusuma sits in the middle of that slow, downward metamorphosis, no longer a bat and not yet a devouring old thing, dangerous in its own right and getting more so.

A separate creature shares its name and muddies its reputation. In the Hata district of Shikoku, the word nobusuma also belonged to an invisible barrier that dropped across the night road, a wall that seemed to stretch on forever when a walker tried to skirt it, close kin to the more famous nurikabe. Written with a different character, the sliding-door one, this nobusuma had a homely weakness: it would dissolve if you stopped, filled a pipe, and blew a few mouthfuls of tobacco smoke at it. The two beings are easily confused and were probably always tangled together in local speech, one a thing that covers your face, the other a thing that blocks your way.

Older than either picture is the bare fact of the animal. The encyclopedia Wakan Sansai Zue, compiled in 1712, already lists the musasabi and nobusuma in the same breath, borrowing its natural history from a Chinese herbal, treating the gliding squirrel as a documented beast rather than a bogey. The monster and the field guide grew up side by side.

Its powers are the powers of a very good nocturnal predator turned malicious. It glides without a sound, it smothers and blinds, it opens veins, and it swallows the one thing a night traveler most needs, which is light. Its weaknesses are the weaknesses of the animal it never quite stopped being. The same brightness that draws it down can dazzle and undo it; a swung torch scatters it as easily as it summons it. And its wall-building twin, for all its menace, folds up before a pipe. The nobusuma frightens best in the dark, and the dark, in the end, is the only place it truly holds.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Nobusuma?

The Nobusuma is a Japanese yokai that takes the form of a giant flying squirrel or a large bat. According to folklore, it is a bat that has lived to a great age and gained supernatural powers, and it glides silently through the night to attack travelers. It was famously illustrated in Toriyama Sekien’s 1779 collection Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki.

Is the Nobusuma dangerous to humans?

Yes. The Nobusuma swoops down onto the faces of people walking alone at night, smothering and blinding them with its outspread membrane, and then sucks their blood. It also drinks the blood of small animals such as cats, making it one of the vampiric creatures of Japanese folklore.

Why does the Nobusuma blow out lanterns?

The Nobusuma is said to feed on fire, so it swoops down to lick or extinguish the flames of torches and lanterns before flying back into the night with a crow-like “gaa gaa” cry. This behavior probably reflects real flying squirrels, whose sensitive night vision is dazzled by bright light, causing them to fly toward or collide with people carrying torches.

What does the Nobusuma turn into?

In folklore the Nobusuma is one stage in a chain of transformations. A long-lived bat becomes a Nobusuma, and a very old Nobusuma is said to transform again into either the Yamachichi, which sucks the breath from sleeping people, or the Momonjii, a hairy old man who attacks travelers and children.

Is the Nobusuma based on a real animal?

Yes. The Nobusuma is drawn directly from the musasabi, the Japanese giant flying squirrel, and its smaller relative the momonga. These nocturnal gliders were already recorded as real animals in the 1712 encyclopedia Wakan Sansai Zue, and their eerie night behavior likely inspired the monstrous version.