Obariyon

The bamboo scrub on the road south of Sanjō holds the damp long after the rain stops, and a man walking home through it at night in the last century of lamplight had his ears open for one particular word. Not a growl. Not footsteps. A small voice, close to the level of his shoulder, saying obariyon. It means carry me on your back. It is a request, and it is polite, and the correct response has been debated in that part of Niigata for a very long time.

The word is dialect. Bariyon renders owaretai, I want to be carried, in the speech of the Echigo plain, and the creature is named for the only sentence it is ever recorded saying. Elsewhere the same being announces itself as obusaritei or simply as a voice going barou barou in the dark. Japanese has a plain compound for it too, onbu-obake, the piggyback ghost, which has the flat accuracy of a term coined by somebody who had to explain it to a child.

The oldest solid record is a local one. Toyama Rekirō gathered folklore in the villages south of Sanjō and published Echigo Sanjō Nangō-dan in 1926, and there the thing appears under the shorter name bariyon, jumping onto the backs of people walking at night and chewing on their heads. That last detail produced one of the more memorable pieces of folk practice on the site: villagers took to walking the night roads with a metal bowl inverted over the skull, a kanabachi, on the reasoning that teeth cannot get through iron. Somewhere in Niigata in the 1920s there were people wearing cookware to walk home. It is a small thing, but it says more about how seriously the road was taken than any amount of description would.

It waits in the roadside scrub where the bamboo grows close, low down, out of the light. When someone passes it calls, and if the answer comes it is on the walker’s back before the sentence is finished, arms around the neck, weight settling in against the spine like a sleeping child.

Then the walking gets hard. The weight does not arrive all at once. It accumulates, step by step, a few pounds heavier at every stride until the shoulders burn and the knees begin to give, and by then the thing cannot easily be shaken loose. The grip has become part of the problem. This is why the creature is so often read as a joke about raising children, and the reading holds up better than most: the burden is willingly accepted, it gets worse for a long time, and there is supposed to be treasure at the end of it.

What the obariyon looks like is a question the sources decline to answer. Toyama’s informants were describing something that happened behind them in the dark, which is the whole point, and the material gives only that the body is small and that its heaviness is out of all proportion to its size. Everyone who has met one has met it by touch. The green ball with limbs that most people picture arrived in the twentieth century, when Mizuki Shigeru drew the creature for Gegege no Kitarō and gave it a face it had never previously needed.

Its origin lies less in a creation story than in a tale type. Folklorists classify the obariyon story under tottsuku hittsuku, cling on or stick on, a pattern found all over Japan: a voice in a lonely place offers something incomprehensible, and a bold or good-hearted person answers it without flinching and is rewarded. In the older shape of the tale there is no creature at all. The man calls back his challenge and gold coins come flying out of the dark and stick to him. The version where a monster climbs onto your back and later turns into money is a considerable mutation of that, and the reward drops out of it entirely in many districts, leaving only a thing that hurts people or a fox that has to be run off.

The reward version still gets told. A man goes deliberately to a place where something is said to appear, hears the voice calling barou barou, and shouts back that if it wants carrying it can be carried. Something enormously heavy lands on him. He walks the whole way home under it without putting it down, and when he finally shrugs the load onto the floor of his house there is gold lying there in the lamplight.

Yanagita Kunio placed the story beside two others in which nerve is the currency: the ubume, who hands her baby to a passerby and grants tremendous strength to whoever holds it, and the kanennushi of the Amakusa islands, which appears in the dress of a samurai and pays out a fortune to anyone who beats it at a contest of strength. In Aomori the same idea is told without any monster in it: gold buried under a tree root cries obusaritei, wanting to be dug up and carried out into the world, and it goes on calling until somebody brave enough comes past.

Not everyone in Niigata thought it was a spirit. In Minamikanbara they said the obariyon was a fox, the barou-gitsune, which took human shape and called out barou barou, and there are tales of men who hunted it down. Similar creatures crowd in from other provinces. The Oppasho-ishi in Tokushima is a stone in a graveyard that demands to be shouldered and grows heavy until the strongman carrying it hurls it down and cracks it in two. Hiba in old Bingo had the oigakari, which drapes itself over people from behind. A tanuki on a slope in Osaka worked the same trick well enough that the hill is named after it.

Its powers are all one power expressed as arithmetic. It can make itself unbearably heavy at will, it can fix its grip so that it cannot be shrugged off, and in the Sanjō accounts it can wound the scalp of the person carrying it. Its voice carries in the dark and it seems able to find anyone travelling alone.

The limits are just as tight. The obariyon cannot simply take a back. It has to ask, and it seems to need an answer, which makes courage the operative defence and also the operative vulnerability, since fear and consent both lead somewhere. It cannot follow a person indoors as a monster; once the threshold is crossed the story ends and the weight becomes metal. Iron over the head stops the biting. And it has no reach beyond the road: nobody meets an obariyon in daylight, in a house, or in company.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an obariyon?

The obariyon is a yōkai from Sanjō in Niigata Prefecture that jumps onto the back of people walking alone at night and demands to be carried. Its name comes from local Echigo dialect and means roughly “carry me piggyback.” Once it is on, it grows heavier with every step and becomes difficult to shake off.

What happens if you carry an obariyon home?

According to the folk tales, the obariyon turns into gold. A person bold enough to answer the voice in the dark and haul the creature the whole way home without putting it down finds that the burden has become a heap of money on the floor. Anyone who panics and throws it off gets nothing.

Why did people wear metal bowls on their heads in Niigata?

Toyama Rekirō’s 1926 folklore survey Echigo Sanjō Nangō-dan records that the bariyon gnawed at the head of whoever it was riding, and that villagers walking night roads wore an inverted metal bowl over the skull for protection. It is one of the few concrete protective customs attached to the creature.

What does an obariyon look like?

The old Niigata sources do not describe its appearance, only that it is small in body and disproportionately heavy, since it is encountered from behind in the dark. The well-known image of a green sphere with arms and legs comes from Mizuki Shigeru’s twentieth-century manga Gegege no Kitarō, not from folklore.

Is the obariyon dangerous?

It is more of an ordeal than a killer. The obariyon crushes and exhausts rather than devours, though the Sanjō accounts have it biting the scalp of the person carrying it, and in districts where the reward has dropped out of the story it is treated as simple harassment or as the work of a fox that ought to be driven off.

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