Obake

Also Known As: お化け; also Bakemono, 化け物, “a thing that changes”
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Shapeshifters
Mythical Attributes: An obake is defined by transformation itself, the capacity of an animal, a plant or a worn-out object to abandon its proper form and appear as something else.
Role in Mythos: Obake is the older and broader Japanese heading under which foxes, cats, badgers, tree spirits and hundred-year-old household goods were all filed as things that had changed, the term the Edo period used for what modern Japanese calls yōkai.
Relation to Humans: Obake trick, obstruct and frighten people rather than curse them, usually by wearing a borrowed shape long enough to lead a traveller astray or to be married for a season before the tail shows. By the eighteenth century townspeople were collecting them on cards and board games, and the word now covers everything from a summer haunted house in Osaka to a chicken-skin story told in Hawaiian English.

A man walking a Kyushu road at night puts his foot forward and the night will not let it through. Nothing stands in front of him. The air has simply gone flat and cool as fresh plaster, and however far he gropes to the left or the right he cannot find an edge to it. Fishermen in Fukuoka described this to the folklorist Yanagita Kunio, who published their accounts in 1933, and they had a name for it: nurikabe, the painted wall. It is a good place to begin, because it shows what the older Japanese word for such things actually meant. Not a ghost. Not a demon. A thing that has changed.

Obake and bakemono are both built on the verb bakeru, to transform, and the verb carries deceit inside it as neatly as it carries change. A bakemono is a fox that is no longer shaped like a fox. It is a house cat grown old enough and clever enough to sit up and speak, a badger wearing a face it found somewhere, a paper umbrella that has spent a century folded in a storehouse and comes out with one eye and one leg. The category is defined by the act rather than the anatomy. Anything that is not the shape it ought to be belongs in it, which is why the heading has always been enormous and slightly untidy.

Yanagita drew the useful line between these things and yūrei, the returning dead. A yūrei fastens onto a particular person and comes in the deep hours of the night. A bakemono belongs to a place and shows itself in the thin light at either end of the day. Put more bluntly, a yūrei used to be somebody and a bakemono used to be something else. In ordinary speech the distinction collapses almost immediately, since obake will serve for any strange apparition at all, which leaves the word meaning more or less what yōkai means and has done for a century.

At the boundary of a rice field at dusk, when the light has gone the colour of weak tea and the frogs are starting up, a fox rises onto its hind legs, shakes itself the way a wet dog does, and walks off down the path in the shape of a young woman carrying a parcel. Nothing announces the change. That is the entire performance.

Because obake is a heading and not an animal, the honest way to depict it has always been to depict a great many at once. From early in the Edo period painters produced handscrolls called bakemonozukushie, indexes of bakemono, and one of the oldest surviving examples sits in the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University. Bakemono no e was made around 1660 and runs to fifteen metres, unusually tall for a handscroll at forty-four centimetres, its thirty-five figures painted in dense pigment with gold and silver accents and each one labelled in brushed ink. There is no signature, no seal, no colophon. Whoever paid for it had money. Its nurikabe, a three-eyed white creature somewhere between a dog and an elephant, was unknown to Japanese scholarship until 2007, and the image spread across the world within months of being photographed.

The eighteenth century did something peculiar to these creatures. The shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune had ordered surveys of natural resources across the country, herbalism flourished, and encyclopedias of plants and animals poured off the blocks. Bakemono were catalogued alongside them, as though they were simply an unusual branch of the fauna. The folklorist Kagawa Masanobu calls the result Edo’s yōkai revolution: sorting them stripped the mystery out, and a creature with a fixed name, a fixed picture and a number in a list is a creature that can be handled. Toriyama Sekien’s Gazu hyakki yagyō of 1776 is the monument to this, the first proper illustrated encyclopedia of the things, and after it a bakemono was expected to have a look. Then came the toys. Sugoroku boards where every square held a different monster. Obake karuta cards from around 1860, where one player read the clue aloud and the children lunged for the matching picture. Japanese children were collecting monsters a hundred and thirty years before Pokémon.

Edo talked about them constantly and believed in them selectively. A popular saying held that beyond the Hakone barrier there was nothing but bumpkins and bakemono, which tells you rather more about how Edoites rated Edo than about the provinces. Another ran that there is no such thing as a bakemono or a teetotaller.

The most famous encounter in English was written by a foreigner. On the Akasaka road in Tokyo a merchant finds a young woman weeping alone beside the moat, and when he finally touches her shoulder she turns and her face is a smooth blank of skin, no eyes, no nose, no mouth. He runs until he reaches the lantern of a soba vendor and blurts out what he has seen, and the vendor says, was it anything like this, and strokes his own features away. The lantern goes out. Lafcadio Hearn published it in 1904 as “Mujina”, after the badger held responsible, though the faceless shape itself is properly a noppera-bō and the badger is only the thing wearing it.

Whatever powers obake have all reduce to one power used many ways. They take a shape that is not theirs and they carry it off for a while. Foxes and raccoon dogs borrow human faces to marry, to beg, to walk a traveller in circles all night through the same three paddies. Objects take the slower route and simply wait, since a tool used for a hundred years is held to wake up. Some do nothing more elaborate than stand in the road and refuse to be walked around.

The flaw is built into the definition. A transformation is temporary, and the borrowed shape slips: a tail left showing beneath a hem, a shadow that keeps the wrong outline, a reflection in a well that does not match the face leaning over it. Daylight ends most of it. The largest defeat came from a philosopher rather than a hero. Inoue Enryō, born 1858, travelled Japan investigating reported hauntings and explaining each of them away as misperception or fraud, founding a discipline he called yōkaigaku in order to abolish its subject. He succeeded and he failed at once. The word he promoted, yōkai, displaced bakemono as the standard term, while the creatures themselves retreated out of belief and into vocabulary, where they have been perfectly comfortable ever since.

They are still working. Obake yashiki, the haunted houses that open every July and August, are treated as a way of cooling down. And when Japanese labourers went to the plantations of Hawaii they took the word with them, where it slipped free of the language entirely: Glen Grant began collecting island ghost reports for the Hawaii Herald in 1983 and published them as his Obake Files, and obake in the islands now means any supernatural thing that gives you chicken skin, used freely by people who speak no Japanese at all. The word did what it describes.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an obake in Japanese folklore?

An obake is a being that has changed its shape. The word comes from the verb bakeru, to transform, and covers foxes, cats, badgers, tree spirits and old household objects that abandon their proper form and appear as something else. It is a category rather than a single creature, and in the Edo period it was the ordinary term for what modern Japanese calls yōkai.

What is the difference between obake and yūrei?

A yūrei is the ghost of a dead person, while an obake is a living thing or object that has transformed. The folklorist Yanagita Kunio distinguished them by noting that yūrei attach themselves to a particular person and appear in the depths of the night, whereas obake belong to places and show themselves at dusk or dawn. In casual speech the two words overlap, and obake is often used loosely for any apparition.

Is obake the same as yōkai?

In practice they mean nearly the same thing, but the words come from different eras. Bakemono and obake were the common terms during the Edo period, and yōkai only became standard in the Meiji period through the campaigning of the philosopher Inoue Enryō, who founded a discipline called yōkaigaku in an attempt to debunk the creatures entirely.

What kinds of creatures count as obake?

Shapeshifting animals are the core of the category: the fox, the raccoon dog, the badger and the aged house cat. Plant spirits such as the kodama belong to it, as do tsukumogami, the household objects said to wake up after a hundred years of use. Beings with a fixed strange form, such as the one-eyed hitotsume-kozō or the faceless noppera-bō, are also called obake.

Why do people in Hawaii say obake?

Japanese plantation workers carried the word to Hawaii, where it entered local English. The folklorist Glen Grant began publishing island ghost reports in the Hawaii Herald in 1983 under the title Obake Files, and in the islands the word now means any supernatural encounter that gives you chicken skin, regardless of the speaker’s background.