Sagari

Also Known As: サガリ; from Japanese sagaru, “to hang down”; recorded first as the name of a place, not of a creature
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: A horse’s head that is said to hang down at one particular spot by a road, most often from an old hackberry tree.
Role in Mythos: A local apparition fixed to one named place in the Okayama countryside, and one of the examples Yanagita Kunio gathered for his 1938 list of Japanese yokai names.
Relation to Humans: The oldest record says only that the head hangs there, and gives it no attack, no voice and no victim. Later compilers report a Kumamoto version in which anyone who sees the head falls ill with a fever.

Just east of the youth club in Ushimado, on the Okayama coast of the Seto Inland Sea, there was a patch of ground the locals called Sagari, and a horse’s head was said to hang there. That is the entire original record. It is one sentence, supplied by a man named Kojima Tsurukichi to the local journal *Okayama Bunka Shiryō* (volume 2, number 6, 1930, pages 344 to 345), and every account of the sagari since descends from it.

The word itself is plain. Sagari comes from sagaru, to hang down, and in the 1930 note it names the place rather than the thing. The creature took the place’s name later, when someone gave it a page of its own.

That someone was Yanagita Kunio, the founder of Japanese folklore studies. In September 1938 he published the fourth instalment of his “Yōkai Meii”, a running list of the names of Japanese monsters, in the journal *Minkan Denshō* (volume 4, number 1, page 12), and cited the Okayama note as his source. He added two things of his own. A horse’s head hanging from an old hackberry by the road, he wrote, is a common enough story, and old Oku district in Bizen province had two such spots, one of which carried the place-name Sagari. His list was later collected into *Yōkai Dangi*, and from there the name passed into every modern dictionary of yokai.

So the scene the record allows is a small one. A road at the edge of a coastal town. An old tree with a heavy, spreading crown. Something that ought to be in a stable, hanging where the leaves are, and a stretch of ground that everyone knew by what hung over it.

The rest is not recorded. Neither source says whose horse it was, how it died or why its head stays in the tree. Neither gives it a cry, a bite or a victim. Neither says whether anyone ever saw it or only knew better than to look. It does not come from an Edo-period picture book either: it is not among the forty-four monsters of Takehara Shunsen’s *Ehon Hyaku Monogatari* of 1841.

Later writers filled some of that silence. Murakami Kenji’s *Yōkai Jiten* (2000) adds a version from Kumamoto in Kyūshū, where a horse’s head was said to hang from a persimmon at the end of the old road in Nankan and from a great hackberry at Oka in Tamana, and where anyone who saw it came down with a fever. Murakami’s entry does not name the record behind the Kumamoto material. The artist Mizuki Shigeru drew the sagari for his illustrated yokai encyclopedia, and later retellings give it a whinnying cry and an origin as the spirit of a horse that died on the road. Neither detail is in the Okayama note or in Yanagita.

The idea of a hanging thing that names a place reaches beyond Okayama. The Nagano prefectural history of 1989 records a Sagari in Takamori, in southern Nagano, named after a night when a man called Densuke, walking home from Iida, felt something as heavy as a severed head press down on him from above. He sat down, lit his tobacco and smoked calmly, and the thing went away. That spot is not the Okayama one and the weight was not a horse, but it shows how the same word fixed itself to places where something came down out of the dark.

Near neighbours do the same work. The yakanzuru, which sits in the same 1938 run of Yanagita’s list, is a kettle that dangles from a tree at night, and the uma-no-ashi of Fukuoka and Yamaguchi is a horse’s leg hanging from a branch. The sagari is the version with a head.

Its power, on the evidence, is the power of a place-name. It made one stretch of road something people spoke of in a particular way. Whatever limits it had, the record does not say.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a sagari?

A sagari is a Japanese yokai described as a horse’s head hanging down at a roadside spot, usually from an old hackberry tree. The name comes from the verb sagaru, “to hang down.” The earliest record, from 1930, uses Sagari as the name of a place in Ushimado, Okayama, where the head was said to hang.

Where does the sagari story come from?

The sagari comes from a one-sentence note in the Okayama journal Okayama Bunka Shiryō, published in 1930, which says a horse’s head was said to hang at a spot called Sagari east of the youth club in Ushimado. Folklorist Yanagita Kunio cited that note in his 1938 list of yokai names, and later yokai dictionaries took the name from him.

Does the sagari hurt people?

The original Okayama record gives the sagari no attack and no victims; it only says the horse’s head hangs there. A later dictionary, Murakami Kenji’s Yōkai Jiten of 2000, reports a Kumamoto version in which anyone who saw the hanging head fell ill with a fever.

Is the sagari in the Ehon Hyaku Monogatari?

No. The sagari is not among the forty-four monsters in Takehara Shunsen’s 1841 picture book Ehon Hyaku Monogatari. Its first written record is the 1930 Okayama note, and its place in yokai lists comes from Yanagita Kunio in 1938.

Why is the sagari a horse’s head?

The early sources do not explain it. Neither the 1930 note nor Yanagita says whose horse it was or how it came to hang there. The story that it is the spirit of a horse that died on the road appears only in later retellings.