Onmoraki

The floor of a temple treasure hall is cold and hard and free, which is why Cui Sifu was asleep on it. He had bedded down on the upper storey of a hall outside the capital, the incense long since burned out, and what woke him was not a footstep or a door. It was a voice, and the voice was telling him off. When his eyes opened there was a bird standing in the dark with him. It was tall, the height and shape of a crane, and it was black from beak to feet, and its eyes were burning steadily like two lamp wicks. It shook out its wings and screamed at him. He ran for the stairs.

That is the entire encounter. He is not clawed, not cursed, not pursued. From the shadow of the corridor he watched the hall, and the bird simply was not there any more.

What he did next is the part that makes the story worth keeping. He found the temple’s monks and asked them what lived in their treasure hall, and they told him nothing did. Then one of them remembered that a corpse had been carried in a few days earlier and laid out upstairs to wait. Back inside the capital, Cui Sifu put the question to a monk at another temple and finally got a name. The Buddhist canon holds that the vapour of a body newly dead can gather itself and change into something, and the something it changes into is called onmoraki.

The tale is Chinese. It sits in the Qingzunlu, a Song dynasty collection of strange accounts attributed to Lian Bu, and it stayed Chinese for several centuries. What carried it into Japan was scholarship rather than folklore. Hayashi Razan, the Confucian who served the early Tokugawa shoguns and built the intellectual scaffolding of their regime, spent part of his life gathering Chinese accounts of the uncanny and rendering them into Japanese. That collection, Kaidan Zensho, was printed in Kyoto and Edo in 1698, decades after his death, and volume four carries the onmoraki. A creature that Japanese readers now file among their own yokai arrived as a translated anecdote about a man sleeping in the wrong room.

Toriyama Sekien gave it a face. His Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki of 1779 devotes a plate to the onmoraki, and the caption underneath is close to a straight quotation of the Chinese text: the form is like a crane, the body is black, the eyes shine like lamp flames, it trembles its feathers and cries out in a high voice. Sekien’s picture became the standard image, and the standard image is the only description anyone has. There is no wingspan, no talon, no beak length, no smell of the grave. For a creature made out of a dead body, the record is oddly clean. It is a black crane with lamps for eyes and a voice that carries, and every later drawing is working from that one sentence.

Japan took the story properly in hand in 1732, when the kaidan collection Taihei Hyaku Monogatari retold it with local furniture. A man named Takubei is dozing in a temple in Yamashiro, the province around Kyoto, when a voice wakes him by calling his name. The bird is there. He bolts, watches from cover, and sees it disappear. The temple elder explains that the canon says the vapour of a fresh corpse becomes an onmoraki, and that a body had recently been laid in the temple to wait. The bones of the Chinese story survive intact. Only one detail has shifted, and it is a good one: the Chinese bird scolds an anonymous sleeper, while the Japanese bird knows the man’s name.

The mechanism behind it is mundane and specific. Temples were where bodies went while arrangements were made, laid out in a side hall awaiting the rites that would settle them, and the interval between death and ceremony was understood as dangerous. Onmoraki is what leaks out of that interval. Later Japanese scholarship reads the creature as an accusation aimed squarely at the clergy, appearing to monks who have let their sutra recitation lapse and to corpses that have not been sufficiently mourned. The bird is not a predator. It is a complaint with feathers.

Its name is built entirely out of Buddhist vocabulary. The middle element is mara, the tempter who obstructs awakening, with the characters for shade and for demon fastened on either side to press the point harder; another reading takes the name as a compound of an older word for obstruction with the rakshasa demon. The authority behind the whole idea is cited as the Daizokyo, which is to say the Buddhist canon entire, without a sutra named or a chapter given. That is a large door to leave open.

What it can do is limited and strange. It arrives out of nothing but the air above a body, needing no parent, no lineage, no prior existence. It materialises inside a consecrated hall, which ought to be the safest room in the district. Its eyes give off light in a dark building. Its cry carries. It vanishes at will and leaves nothing behind.

What it cannot do is almost everything else. It has no weapon, no appetite, no myth cycle, no enemy, and no interest in anyone beyond the room it is standing in. Both surviving tales end with a man walking away unharmed and slightly embarrassed. It is tethered to one particular corpse in one particular building, and when the chanting is done and the body is buried it has no reason to exist and does not. The real limit is stricter still: perform the rites on time and the bird never forms at all. Every recorded appearance is a story about somebody who did not.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Onmoraki?

The Onmoraki is a monstrous black bird of Chinese and Japanese tradition, said to form from the vapour rising off a newly dead body. It is described as crane-shaped, black over its whole body, with eyes that glow like lamp flames, and it shakes its wings and cries in a high voice. It appears in temples where a corpse has been laid out and the proper rites have been neglected.

Where does the Onmoraki story come from?

The oldest version is Chinese, recorded in the Song dynasty collection Qingzunlu attributed to Lian Bu, in which a man named Cui Sifu meets the bird while sleeping in a temple hall outside the capital. The Confucian scholar Hayashi Razan translated the tale into Japanese for his collection Kaidan Zensho, printed in 1698, and the artist Toriyama Sekien illustrated the creature in Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki in 1779. A localised Japanese version appears in the 1732 kaidan collection Taihei Hyaku Monogatari.

Is the Onmoraki dangerous?

No one is harmed by the Onmoraki in any of the surviving accounts. In both the Chinese and the Japanese tales the bird wakes a sleeper with a voice, screams when he flees, and then disappears without pursuing him. Its function is to rebuke rather than to attack, and it is generally read as a warning aimed at monks who have neglected their sutra recitation.

What does the name Onmoraki mean?

The name is built from Buddhist vocabulary. One explanation takes the central element as mara, the demon who obstructs enlightenment in Buddhist thought, with the characters for shade and for demon added to intensify the sense of a malign spirit. Another reads it as a blend of a term meaning obstruction with the name of the rakshasa demon.

How do you stop an Onmoraki appearing?

The tales imply that proper funeral observance prevents it. The Onmoraki is tied to the interval between death and the completion of the rites, forming above a body that has been temporarily laid out in a temple and not yet properly mourned. Once the recitation is performed and the body is settled, there is nothing for it to rise from.

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