Taka-onna

Someone upstairs is awake, and the paper screen glows, and outside in the alley the cold is the ordinary cold of an Edo night. Then a face rises into the lattice. It rises the way a bucket rises from a well, steadily, without effort, without the sound of a ladder or a foot on a beam. Below the chin there is a neck, and below that a body, and below that the body keeps going down into the dark of the alley for the whole height of the house, thin as a rope paid out from a spool. She does not knock. She does not come in.

She was printed in 1776, on a single leaf of Toriyama Sekien’s *Gazu Hyakki Yagyō*, the first of the four illustrated yōkai books that would shape almost everything Japan drew afterwards. The leaf carries her picture and her two characters, 高女, tall woman. That is the whole of it. Sekien wrote no caption for this book, no gloss, no scrap of provenance, and so the oldest thing anyone can say about the taka-onna with confidence is what the woodblock shows. Nobody knows what she was supposed to be.

What the block shows is worth looking at closely, because it has done all the work ever since. She is lean to the point of gauntness, dressed plainly, her hair loose and unstyled, and her expression gives away nothing at all. From the hips down she is no longer a woman so much as a stalk, a smooth serpentine column that climbs out of a narrow street and folds her upper body against the second-floor lattice of a wooden townhouse. The roofline, the shutters, the timber all place her in a dense urban quarter. Sekien has drawn her at the exact height of a building she is not inside.

He was playing a game his readers understood. The *Gazu Hyakki Yagyō* borrows heavily from an earlier painted scroll, Sawaki Sūshi’s *Hyakkai Zukan* of 1737, but Sekien’s real innovation was the format: woodblock prints, bound and mass-produced, one monster to a page, laid out in deadpan imitation of the encyclopedias of the day. Some of his creatures came out of old stories. Some he seems to have made up on the spot and slid in among them, straight-faced, and the book’s authority did the rest. Tada Katsumi reads the taka-onna as one of the invented ones, a joke aimed at the Yoshiwara, where the ranking courtesans kept the upper floor and everyone else stayed below. The only way for a woman without standing to reach that second storey was to grow.

For a hundred and fifty years she stayed a picture. Then, in the 1920s, the folklorist Fujisawa Morihiko put her into his *Yōkai Gadan Zenshū* with a job to do: in Wakayama, he wrote, the taka-onna is the thing that startles people on the upper floors of the brothels. He also connected her to a local horror called the takanyōbō, the tall wife, and that story has teeth. A woodcutter of Kizaku village married a woman who went into the forest and worked timber beside him, strong as any man, and he counted himself lucky. Over the course of a year his servants stopped staying. Thirty of them went. Then his own small child went. When he understood at last what he had married, he threw her down the well, and she stood at the bottom of it in the dark and let the lower half of her body lengthen until her hands found the coping, and she climbed out into the night and was gone. The versions disagree about her: some make her an oni of seven shaku, close to seven feet, unclothed and roaring, and let the husband run for the mountains rather than fight.

In 1974 the novelist Yamada Norio gave her a second life in *Tōhoku Kaidan no Tabi*, this time as an Akita ghost story. His taka-onna was a plain woman no man would have, eaten through by jealousy, who came back stretched and hollow to look through the upper windows of the pleasure houses at everything she had been refused. That is the version most people now know, and it is the version most post-war yōkai books repeat.

The yōkai researcher Murakami Kenji is unsentimental about all of this. Fujisawa’s explanation, he notes, is nothing more than what a man might imagine while looking at Sekien’s drawing, and Yamada’s kaidan is a different story altogether that had the taka-onna’s name attached to it. The peeping, envious woman who has become her defining character is younger than the electric light. She is a twentieth-century idea hung on an eighteenth-century image, which is not the same thing as a lie, but is worth knowing before repeating.

Her power is exactly one power. She elongates, silently, and she does it upward. She has no claws in any account, sets no curse, strikes no bargain, and never once speaks. What she has instead is architecture. She needs a second storey and a window left open to the night, and the whole of her menace lives in the gap between how high a face has any business being and how high this one is.

That is also her limit. Shutter the upper floor and she has nothing to look through. Bring a lamp to the lattice and the advantage of the dark is gone. No source records a weapon that works on her, a prayer that drives her off, or a hero who ever beat her, and the reason is plain enough: nobody ever wrote her a fight. The takanyōbō is the exception, and even there the husband’s answer is to run. She is a creature made of the sensation of being watched from an impossible height, and sensations do not have to be killed. They only have to be given somewhere else to be.

She has not stopped attracting trouble. Mizuki Shigeru drew her for the modern era, and one of his designs was cast as a stone statue and set up in a harbourside park in Gobō, Wakayama, in 2009, among nine other yōkai. In August 2016 staff found her snapped off at the base and reported it. Her torso turned up on the harbour floor under four and a half metres of water, right hand broken. A high-school student was eventually referred to prosecutors for kicking her over.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Taka-onna?

The Taka-onna is a Japanese yōkai whose name means “tall woman” and whose defining trait is that she stretches the lower half of her body to reach the second floor of a building. She first appears as an illustration in Toriyama Sekien’s *Gazu Hyakki Yagyō* of 1776. Sekien gave her a picture and a name but no explanatory text, so what she was originally meant to be is unknown.

What does the Taka-onna do?

In the accounts that circulate today, the Taka-onna elongates her body in a street or alley until her face is level with an upper-storey window, then looks in silently at the people inside. She is a frightener rather than an attacker: no source gives her claws, a curse, or a weapon. Her whole effect comes from appearing at a height no person could reach.

Is the story of the jealous woman who becomes a Taka-onna genuinely old?

No. That version comes from the novelist Yamada Norio’s *Tōhoku Kaidan no Tabi* of 1974, where a plain woman rejected by men transforms and peers into the upper floors of pleasure houses. The folklorist Fujisawa Morihiko had earlier, in the 1920s, described her as something that startles people on the second floors of brothels in Wakayama. The yōkai researcher Murakami Kenji has argued that Fujisawa was simply interpreting Sekien’s drawing and that Yamada attached the Taka-onna’s name to an unrelated tale.

What is the Takanyōbō?

The Takanyōbō, or “tall wife”, is a Wakayama story linked to the Taka-onna by Fujisawa Morihiko. A woodcutter’s wife who worked timber alongside him turned out to be a yōkai who had eaten some thirty servants and the couple’s own child. When her husband threw her into a well she lengthened the lower half of her body, climbed out over the rim and escaped into the night.

Why is the Taka-onna associated with brothels?

Sekien’s original illustration places her against the second floor of what looks like a pleasure-quarter townhouse, and later writers built on that setting. Tada Katsumi has suggested the image was Sekien’s own invention satirising the Yoshiwara, Edo’s licensed quarter, where the highest-ranking courtesans occupied the upper floor. Fujisawa and Yamada both later described her specifically as peering into the second storeys of brothels.

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