Nurarihyon

Also Known As: ぬらりひょん, sometimes written 滑瓢; also Nurihyon, Nurarin
Region/Culture: East Asia, Japanese
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: A yokai defined by ungraspability, appearing in the oldest records as a slippery floating thing on the sea and in the Edo picture books as a richly dressed old man who cannot be pinned to any story.
Role in Mythos: It carries almost no myth of its own, and the roles now attached to it, unwanted houseguest and supreme commander of all yokai, were written for it in the twentieth century.
Relation to Humans: In the Okayama sea tradition it teases fishermen, sliding out of their hands and bobbing up again just out of reach. In its modern form it walks into an occupied house, is mistaken for the master of it, and is served tea by people who only realise their error after it has gone.

The Seto Inland Sea goes flat as poured oil on a summer evening, and something the size of a man’s head comes up alongside the boat. It is pale, rounded, glistening. A fisherman leans out and closes his hand on it and finds nothing there, only a slick sensation like wet plum skin passing through his fingers, and then the thing is up again a few feet off, bobbing, patient, waiting to be grabbed at a second time. That is the oldest nurarihyon anyone can point to. It has no face, no robe, and no throne.

The creature most of Japan would picture today is a different animal altogether. He is an old man with a bald head swollen and pulled backward into the shape of a bottle gourd, wrapped in the good silk of a wealthy priest, stepping down out of a palanquin at a stranger’s gate with the unhurried confidence of a man arriving somewhere he owns. That image has a birthday. Toriyama Sekien drew it for his woodblock book Gazu Hyakki Yagyo in 1776, and a version of the same figure had already appeared in the Hyakkai Zukan, the illustrated bestiary Sawaki Suushi finished in 1737. Sekien wrote a name beside his and nothing else. No story, no habits, no explanation. He did not even write nurarihyon; the label on the plate reads Nurihyon, and the folklorist Murakami Kenji has argued that the whole familiar appearance of the creature is Sekien’s own invention rather than anything he collected.

What came before the picture is thinner and stranger. An ukiyo-zoshi of 1703, the Koshoku Haidokusan, disposes of the creature in a single line: it looks like a catfish, it has neither eyes nor mouth, and it is a spirit of deception. That is the entire early literary record, and it places the nurarihyon among the faceless things of the sea rather than among gentlemen in silk. In Okayama the name belonged to a kind of umi-bozu, a bulbous swimmer bobbing on the Inland Sea, most likely a jellyfish seen at dusk and given a name. The words themselves point the same way. Nurari means slippery or evasive, and hyon, in that part of the country, means to float.

Then comes the scene everyone knows. A household at the end of the day, rice steaming, someone shouting for a cloth, the front of the house standing open because there is too much to carry in and out to bother closing it. An old man in expensive robes walks in, settles himself in the best seat, and pours the tea. The family serve him, because obviously he is somebody. He drinks, he smokes, he leaves. Only afterwards does anyone ask who he was.

That scene is not old. It was written in 1929 by the folklorist Fujisawa Morihiko, as a caption placed underneath a reproduction of Sekien’s plate in his collected volumes of yokai painting, and no earlier tradition of it has ever been found. Fujisawa looked at a picture of a well-dressed old man stepping into a house, and supplied the only thing missing, which was a reason.

The greater title came later still. Children’s yokai encyclopedias of the 1970s began calling him the yokai sodaisho, the supreme commander of all yokai. Mizuki Shigeru put him in GeGeGe no Kitaro announcing himself with exactly that rank, at first as the sort of boast a confidence trickster would make, and the animated series of 1985 needed a permanent villain and gave him the job in earnest. Nobody in the Edo period thought he was in charge of anything. When Edo writers wondered who led the monsters, they tended to answer Mikoshi-nyudo, the towering bald monk who grows taller the longer you look up at him.

He is not the leader of the night parade either. The illustrated Hyakki Yagyo scrolls of the Muromachi period, which gave most yokai their faces, do not contain him at all, and in any case those parades have no leader; the procession ends when the sun comes up and the monsters scatter backwards from the light. One Edo account does put him in the street, listing nurarihyon among the creatures that march at twilight under low cloud alongside otoroshi and nozuchi, which is a walk-on part rather than a command. The manga Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan supplied the rest, casting him as the head of a household of monsters with a banner of its own.

His powers are all versions of the same trick. He cannot be held. He arrives without being invited and is obeyed without being questioned, because he behaves as though the question could not arise, and deception in the old line from 1703 is the one attribute that has stayed with him from the beginning. Nothing about him is forced. He takes authority the way the sea creature takes the water, by offering no surface to push against.

His limits follow from the same emptiness. There is no charm against him, no ritual, no weapon, because there is nothing recorded that anyone ever needed to defend against. He steals nothing but tea. He kills nobody. He cannot be caught, but he also cannot stay, and every account ends with him already gone. A being with no attested nature can be filled with anything, and for three centuries Japan has been filling him, which is why the gourd-headed old man is now more famous than any of the monsters he supposedly commands.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Nurarihyon?

Nurarihyon is a yokai of Japanese folklore, most often shown as an elderly man with a bald, gourd-shaped head in fine priestly robes. He first appears in Edo-period picture books of the 1700s as an image with a name and no story attached. The character now associated with him was written by twentieth-century authors.

Is Nurarihyon really the supreme commander of the yokai?

No older tradition supports it. The title yokai sodaisho was attached to him by children’s yokai encyclopedias in the 1970s and fixed in the popular mind by Mizuki Shigeru’s GeGeGe no Kitaro, particularly the animated series that began in 1985. Edo-period writers who named a chief of the monsters usually named Mikoshi-nyudo instead.

What does Nurarihyon do to people?

In his best-known modern form he walks into a house during the busy early evening, sits down, drinks the family’s tea and smokes as though he were the master of the household, and is waited on by people who assume he must belong there. He does no harm beyond the imposition. That behaviour was first written down in 1929 by the folklorist Fujisawa Morihiko as a caption to an older picture.

What is the sea nurarihyon?

In Okayama Prefecture the name belonged to a sea creature rather than an old man, a pale rounded mass about the size of a human head that floats on the Seto Inland Sea. It slips out of the hands of anyone who tries to seize it and bobs back to the surface just out of reach, and it is usually explained as a jellyfish. This is the oldest layer of the tradition and is treated as a type of umi-bozu.

Where does the name Nurarihyon come from?

It is nearly always written in hiragana, which carries no meaning of its own. Nurari means slippery or evasive, and hyon in the Okayama dialect refers to floating on the water, which fits the sea creature exactly. The characters 滑瓢, slippery gourd, were attached later to match both the sound and the shape of the old man’s head.