Ōkubi

Also Known As: 大首, “great head”; the older female-head apparition is also called Tsura-onna, 面女
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Undead/Cursed Beings
Mythical Attributes: An ōkubi is a human head swollen to two or three metres and separated from any body, appearing in a night sky, over a wall, or filling a doorway.
Role in Mythos: It is the Edo period’s stock apparition of scale, the shape a grudge or an obsession was said to take when it outgrew the person carrying it.
Relation to Humans: It confronts people rather than attacking them, and the old accounts record almost no injury beyond a single case of breath that raised a yellow swelling. It is defeated by refusing to react to it, which is exactly how the most famous encounter ends.

Rain had stopped over Kanazawa and the moon was working clear of the cloud when the thunder came, and with the thunder came the head. Six or seven shaku, taller than a man. It had settled on the top of a garden wall the way a cat settles on a fence, and it looked over into the yard. Whoever wrote the night down did not say whether it made any sound. What survives is the wet stone, the late moon, and a face large enough to see over a wall.

That story sits in the Sanshū Kidan, a collection of oddities gathered by the haiku poet Hori Bakusui in the middle of the eighteenth century, and it is one of dozens like it. Edo Japan produced a great many giant heads. They appear in kaidan collections, in the miscellanies educated men kept as commonplace books, in illustrated scrolls copied from house to house and lent between neighbours. They are nearly always female. They nearly always have blackened teeth.

The teeth are the detail that does the work. Ohaguro marked a married woman, and a woman’s face the size of a doorway with a mouth of black lacquer told an Edo reader immediately that this was not a demon out of a sutra but somebody’s wife, or somebody’s mother, vastly enlarged and detached from the rest of herself. The name is no grander than the thing. Ōkubi means big head, or great severed head, and it names a class of apparitions rather than an individual. No ōkubi has a parentage or a dwelling. Each one is a head, and the question of whose head it used to be is the entire mystery.

The picture everybody now reproduces is Toriyama Sekien’s. In 1779 he published Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki, the sequel to his first yōkai album and the first of his books to give each creature a caption as well as a portrait, and the fifty-first plate is an ōkubi: a woman’s head with blackened teeth hanging in a rainy night sky. It is worth knowing that Sekien is not evidence of belief. Tada Katsumi, who wrote the modern commentaries on Sekien’s complete works, reads that particular plate as an invention rather than a record, a joke at the expense of the precept-breaking clergy of Sekien’s own day. The image is famous. Its pedigree as folklore is thinner than its fame suggests.

The heads themselves do not depend on him. The best documented encounter belongs to the most celebrated haunting in Japanese tradition. In 1749 a young man of Miyoshi in Bingo province, Inō Heitarō, was visited for thirty consecutive nights by one monster after another and declined, night after night, to be frightened by any of them, until the monsters gave up and left. The account of it, the Inō Mononoke Roku, was copied, illustrated and rewritten for the next two centuries. One branch of that tradition, an illustrated scroll titled Tōtei Bukkairoku that survives at Keio University and at the Hiroshima Prefectural Museum of History and Folklore, gives one of the nights its own heading: the Marvel of the Great Head. Heitarō opened a storeroom door and found an old woman’s face filling the frame, teeth blackened, taking up the whole opening. He fetched a pair of iron fire tongs and stabbed it. It did not flinch. He put his hand on it and found it sticky.

That is the whole episode.

The pattern repeats with variations across the country. The Ganyū Kaidanroku, a book of strange tales from Iwakuni in what is now Yamaguchi prefecture, carries a story called the Monster of the Old Castle in which a woman climbing the hill called Oshiroyama meets a woman’s severed head roughly a jō high, about three metres, which beams at her, cheerfully, and does nothing else at all.

Where they come from depends on who is explaining. The standard modern reference position, set out in Murakami Kenji’s yōkai dictionary, is that these heads are human vengeful spirits and fixations that have hardened into a visible shape, which is why they wear the ohaguro of a specific social role rather than the horns of a demon. Tada has recorded the other Edo answer, older and more cynical: a fox or a tanuki is doing it, and the head is a performance. Both explanations were in circulation at once, which is normal for this material and a good deal more honest than a single tidy origin would be.

The vengeance reading has the better literary line behind it. A yomihon of the Bunka era, Kinsei Kaidan Shimoyo no Hoshi, generally treated as an ancestor of the Yotsuya Kaidan, has a woman destroyed by a conspiracy return over Kamakura as an enormous head, and Hokusai’s illustration of it is one of the strongest images in the genre. There is also a claim of much greater antiquity that needs handling with care. Koikawa Harumachi’s comic picture book Yōkai Shiuchi Hyōbanki says that a giant woman’s head called tsura-onna appeared on the night Taira no Kiyomori moved the capital to Fukuhara in the twelfth century. That is a late Edo humourist writing about the Heian past, not a Heian source, and the ōkubi’s documented life begins with the Edo booksellers who sold it.

What it can do is almost entirely a matter of scale. It arrives without warning at a size that makes the ordinary world briefly unusable: a doorway that cannot be walked through, a wall with a face on it, a sky with a mouth in it. It cannot be hurt, as the fire tongs demonstrate. It appears in rain and thunder more often than not, and it favours thresholds and boundaries, the storehouse door and the garden wall. Hori Bakusui’s account preserves the one clear instance of physical harm anywhere in the record: somebody was breathed on, the skin where the breath landed swelled up yellow, and the person fell ill until a doctor prescribed a medicated bath and they recovered.

The limits are more interesting than the powers. An ōkubi cannot follow, cannot seize, cannot bargain, and in most accounts cannot even speak. It is a grudge with no way to act on itself, which may be the most frightening thing about it and is certainly the most pitiable. Nobody in the old texts is killed by one. The counter to it is composure, and the proof is Heitarō, who touched a giant face in his own storehouse, noted that it was sticky, and went on with his month.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an Ōkubi in Japanese folklore?

An ōkubi is a giant disembodied human head that appears in Japanese folklore of the Edo period, usually a woman’s head two to three metres across with teeth blackened in the ohaguro style of a married woman. The name simply means “great head”. It describes a class of apparitions rather than one named creature, and each ōkubi is understood as somebody’s head, enlarged and detached.

Is the Ōkubi dangerous?

Barely. Across the Edo accounts the ōkubi confronts people rather than harming them, and the one recorded injury comes from the Sanshū Kidan, where a person breathed on by a giant head developed a yellow swelling and fell ill until a doctor prescribed a medicated bath. It cannot be wounded, but it also cannot pursue, seize or speak.

Where does the Ōkubi appear in old Japanese texts?

The best known encounter is in the Inō Mononoke Roku, the record of a thirty-night haunting of Inō Heitarō at Miyoshi in 1749, where an illustrated version titled Tōtei Bukkairoku gives the episode the heading “the Marvel of the Great Head”. Others appear in Hori Bakusui’s Sanshū Kidan at Kanazawa, in the Ganyū Kaidanroku of Iwakuni, and in the yomihon Kinsei Kaidan Shimoyo no Hoshi. Toriyama Sekien also drew one as the fifty-first plate of his 1779 album Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki.

Why does the Ōkubi have black teeth?

The blackened teeth are ohaguro, the tooth lacquering worn by married women in premodern Japan, and they identify the apparition as an adult married woman rather than a demon. That detail supports the usual explanation of the ōkubi, recorded in Murakami Kenji’s yōkai dictionary, that these heads are the vengeful spirits or fixations of real people made visible.

How is an Ōkubi defeated?

It is not fought so much as ignored. Inō Heitarō stabbed the head that filled his storeroom doorway with iron fire tongs and it did not react, so he touched it, found it sticky, and carried on, and the haunting eventually ran out of patience and left. Since the ōkubi’s whole power is the shock of its size, refusing to be shocked removes it.