Shikome (also Yomotsu-shikome; alternate name Yomotsu-hisame)

Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Demons and Devils
Mythical Attributes: Corpse-hags of the underworld whose unrelenting speed and hunger make them weapons of the dead Izanami’s wrath.
Role in Mythos: They are sent to drag the god Izanagi back into Yomi after he breaks his promise and looks upon his wife’s decayed body.
Relation to Humans: They have no recorded dealings with the living outside the foundational myth, but their name was carried forward in Japanese folklore as a warning, a shape used to frighten children, and a way to talk about the corruption of the body after death. They sit at the threshold between this world and the next, and they exist as a measure of what the underworld will send after a person who refuses to honor its rules.

The slope into Yomi is dark and uneven, and the air tastes of cold iron and rot. Somewhere on it, a man is running. He has just looked at something he was told not to look at, and now the dead are awake and behind him, and the things at the front of the pack are women who used to be something else.

The Shikome are old enough to belong to the oldest layer of Japanese myth, the chronicled creation period recorded in the Kojiki of the early eighth century and echoed with variant readings in the Nihon Shoki. Their full name in the Kojiki is Yomotsu-shikome, the ugly women of Yomi, the land of the dead. The Nihon Shoki preserves an alternate reading, Yomotsu-hisame, and one of the chronicle’s variant passages notes outright that the two names describe the same beings. The name may have been singular or collective; some readings count eight of them. The number matters less than the way they move, which is fast enough that a god could not outpace them on foot.

They came into being to serve the rage of the goddess Izanami. She had given birth to Kagutsuchi, the fire god, and the birth had killed her, scorched her open from the inside. Her husband Izanagi could not bear the loss and went down through the dim country to bring her back. She met him at the threshold and asked him to wait while she negotiated with the powers of that place, and asked him not to look. He could not stand the wait. He broke a tooth from his comb, lit it as a torch, and stepped past the threshold to find her.

What he saw was a body full of maggots, blackened at the head and chest and belly, with eight thunder gods perched on the decay. She woke. The shame of being seen this way was a thing she could not forgive, and Izanami sent her household after him. The Shikome were first.

They came up the slope at a speed nothing living could match, hair streaming, mouths open, their hunger already half their reason for being. Izanagi ran. He flung off the black vine that bound his hair, and where it landed it grew into wild grapes. The hags stopped and ate. He kept running. They came again. He pulled the comb from his right hair-knot and threw it, and the comb sprouted into bamboo shoots, and the hags stopped and ate. He kept running. They came again.

At the pass called Yomotsu Hirasaka, the flat slope at the boundary of the underworld, he found a peach tree growing in the half-light, and he threw three of its fruit at the pursuers. The peaches sent them back. Later Japanese ritual would treat the peach as a charm against evil, and the encounter at the slope is usually given as the reason.

Their power is in their speed and in what they are. They run faster than any living creature can run. They do not tire. Their hunger functions like obedience; the only thing that reliably interrupts them is food they cannot refuse. The grapes and bamboo shoots in the myth are not random objects but the trick that names their weakness: they eat what is in front of them before they remember what they were sent to do. The peach is the harder weapon, and in later tradition that fruit’s apotropaic power is treated as proof that the underworld itself recognizes its authority.

Their weaknesses are the inverse of their strengths. They can be slowed by anything edible thrown in their path. They can be turned back by the peach, which carries an old and unargued force in Japanese folk belief. They are bound to Yomi and to Izanami’s will, which means they pursue but do not invade; once Izanagi sealed the slope with a boulder, they were on the other side of it forever.

Later artists gave them more flesh. The classical hag has long black hair, claws, ragged court robes, and a face caked in the white makeup of a high-born woman gone to rot, an image that takes the original ugliness and lays a kind of broken refinement over it. The texture matters. The makeup is meant to be cracked. The robes are meant to drag. The horror is not the demon but the human suggestion still legible inside it.

For centuries the Shikome were used as bogeymen, or more accurately bogeywomen, to frighten Japanese children. The same myth that gave parents a name to scare with also gave adults a different fear to sit with: the fear of being seen after death has done its work, the fear that the body left behind cannot be borne by the people who loved it. The Shikome are what gets sent when that line is crossed.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Shikome?

A Shikome is a corpse-like hag of Japanese mythology bound to Yomi, the land of the dead. Also known as Yomotsu-shikome, they are female demons sent by the goddess Izanami to chase her husband Izanagi out of the underworld after he saw her decayed body.

Why did Izanami send the Shikome after Izanagi?

Izanami sent the Shikome to punish Izanagi for breaking his promise not to look at her in the underworld. Seeing her rotting form shamed her, and the hags were dispatched as the first wave of her vengeance, followed by thunder gods and a host of warriors.

How did Izanagi escape the Shikome?

Izanagi escaped by throwing objects behind him that the hags stopped to eat. His vine headband became wild grapes and his comb became bamboo shoots, both of which the Shikome devoured. At the slope called Yomotsu Hirasaka, he threw three peaches from a tree and the Shikome finally turned back.

Are the Shikome one being or many?

Ancient sources disagree. The Kojiki uses a name that can read as singular or collective, while the Nihon Shoki preserves a variant in which eight female demons hunted Izanagi. Most modern readings treat the Shikome as a group rather than a single hag.

Why do peaches scare the Shikome?

The peach has long been considered an evil-warding fruit in East Asian belief, and the encounter at Yomotsu Hirasaka is often cited as the mythological origin of its protective power in Japan. When Izanagi flung three peaches at the Shikome, the fruit’s force was strong enough to drive them back into the underworld.