Yanari

Also Known As: 家鳴, 家鳴り, 鳴家, 鳴屋, “house sound” or “house creak”; the Toriyama Sekien plate is titled Nariya
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: Shakes and sounds a building from within its own frame, without wind, earthquake or any visible cause.
Role in Mythos: Explains the unaccountable groaning and trembling of a house, recorded in Japan as an ill omen from the seventh century onward and personified in the eighteenth as a crew of small mischief-making demons.
Relation to Humans: It torments sleepers by making their own home move around them, and in the recorded cases it drives people out of a building rather than harming them. Where a cause is named, it is almost always a wronged or unquiet spirit lodged beneath the floor.

The sound comes at the hour when there is nobody awake to argue about it. A joint above the ceiling gives a dry crack like a knuckle. Another answers from the far corner. Then the whole frame leans into a long groan, the paper screens shiver in their grooves, and anyone lying on the matting feels the movement arrive through the floor and into the shoulder blades. Japan has a word for this. Yanari, house-sound, and for the better part of a thousand years it was among the plainest and most frightening things a building could do to the people sleeping inside it.

The written record is older than almost anything else in the yokai canon. The Nihon Shoki, closing out the tenth year of Tenji in 671, notes that the eight great cauldrons in the palace kitchen bureau began to ring of their own accord: sometimes one, sometimes two, sometimes three together, and once all eight at the same time. A century later the Shoku Nihongi is still logging the same class of event, and by then the reports have moved from cookware to architecture. In 780 the province of Ise sent word that a drum inside the fort at the Suzuka Barrier had sounded once, unstruck, at mid-morning. That autumn the drums of the left and right armouries sounded, followed by a noise like arrows in flight that carried all the way to the inner store. The next spring Mimasaka reported that the weapons house in Tomata district shook and boomed twice in a single afternoon, the noise building like slow thunder. And in the fifth month of 781, Ise wrote in again: the gate of the Suzuka Barrier and four of its guardhouses had rung and shuddered without stopping for two days, with a sound like wood being driven against the building.

That last one is the thing itself. Not an object rattling on a shelf but a building making noise out of its own timbers, filed by a provincial governor as a matter fit for the throne. Kitchens and arsenals, the two rooms where a state keeps what it cannot afford to lose. When the Azuma Kagami records a hearth sounding strangely in the food store of the shogunal palace in 1228, it is the same anxiety, five centuries on and several hundred miles east.

None of those accounts contains a creature. They describe a noise, they treat it as an omen, and they leave the dark space under the floor entirely empty.

That space was filled in 1776. Toriyama Sekien, a Kano-trained painter with a cataloguer’s temperament, published the Gazu Hyakki Yagyo in three slim volumes, each page carrying one yokai and, in most cases, nothing but its name. On one of those pages sits Nariya, the sounding house, and Sekien drew the culprits: small oni, knee-high things with horns and the hunched shoulders of full-grown demons, putting their weight into the posts and floorboards of a house for the sheer pleasure of it. He supplied no story. He rarely did in that first book. He simply gave the oldest anomaly in the archive a body, and the body stuck.

Four decades before Sekien picked up his brush, a collection of ghost stories printed in Osaka in 1732 had already attached a proper tale to the noise. In Tajima, in what is now the north of Hyogo, a group of masterless samurai took a dare and spent the night in a house the district knew to be haunted. Late on, the building began to shake hard enough to send them all into the street, and it was there, standing in the cold, that they understood what they were looking at. Nothing else on the road was moving. Only that one house.

It happened again the next night, so they brought a monk back with them and waited. He did not chant. He sat on the tatami and watched it, worked out which patch of floor was heaving hardest, and drove a small knife straight down into it. The shaking stopped at once and never resumed. In the morning they lifted the boards and found a grave marker underneath, cut with a name, and from the character meaning eye, exactly where the blade had gone in, blood was running. The neighbours supplied the rest. A bear had once torn through the district; the man who lived in that house killed it and raised the tablet to quiet the animal’s curse, which failed, since the bear’s spirit took him anyway. After his death it stayed on in the rooms, rattling them.

The last famous case reads differently because a newspaper wrote it down. In November 1901 the Niroku Shinpo ran an account of a tenement in Honjo ward in Tokyo. The previous year a man named Kageyama Josaku had lost a newborn daughter two days after her birth, then his elder daughter on the seventh-day memorial for the first, then his wife on the twenty-eighth day. The funerals ruined him. Creditors arrived and carried the furniture out through the door piece by piece, and Josaku walked away and was not seen again. After that the tenement began to sound every night in the third quarter of the hour of the ox, and the remaining residents started looking for somewhere else to live. The neighbourhood agreed on the cause without much debate: three dead women with a grievance and nowhere to put it.

What the yanari does is not complicated, and that is most of its strength. It has no form anyone needs to see, no door it needs to come through, and no interest in the people it terrifies beyond keeping them awake. It works through the structure itself, so there is nothing to bar and nothing to strike, and it can empty a building of its tenants without ever once being looked at directly. Nobody in any of these accounts is hurt.

Its limits follow from the same fact. Noise and motion are all it has. It answers to whatever grievance is lodged beneath it, which means it can be ended by settling that grievance or, in the Tajima case, by one accurate blade into the right square foot of floor. And it was finally undone by something duller than any monk. The word is still in ordinary use in Japanese, where yanari now means the creaking a house makes as its timber swells and shrinks with heat and damp. It is a common complaint in new builds, where the wood has not yet settled, and bad cases end in disputes between homeowners and construction firms. One of the country’s largest housebuilders holds a patent on a device for locating the source of the sound. The anomaly that once went into the imperial annals is now a warranty claim.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a yanari in Japanese folklore?

Yanari is the name for a house or its furniture shaking and groaning for no discoverable reason, and also for the creatures blamed for it. Toriyama Sekien’s 1776 print collection Gazu Hyakki Yagyo depicts them as small oni-like yokai, roughly knee-high and horned, physically heaving at the frame of a house. The word itself is written with characters meaning house and sound.

Is the yanari the same thing as a poltergeist?

Modern Japanese writers generally treat yanari as the local equivalent of the Western poltergeist, since both involve unexplained noise and movement inside a dwelling rather than an apparition. The older Japanese accounts differ in one respect: they usually name a specific dead person or animal whose spirit is lodged under the house, rather than leaving the disturbance anonymous.

How far back does the yanari go?

The phenomenon is recorded far earlier than the creature. The Nihon Shoki reports eight cauldrons in the palace kitchen sounding by themselves in 671, and the Shoku Nihongi records the gate and guardhouses of the Suzuka Barrier shaking and sounding continuously for two days in 781. The small horned imps only appear in 1776, when Sekien drew them.

How do you stop a yanari?

In the best-known story, from a 1732 Osaka collection of ghost tales, a monk watched the floor of a haunted house in Tajima, identified the patch that shook most violently, and drove a knife into it, which stopped the shaking permanently. Beneath the boards lay a grave marker raised for a bear killed by a former resident. The pattern in these accounts is that the disturbance ends when whatever lies under the house is dealt with.

Does the word yanari still mean anything today?

Yes, and its everyday meaning is entirely mundane. Yanari now refers to the creaking and popping a wooden house makes as its timbers expand and contract with temperature and humidity, a frequent complaint in newly built homes where the materials have not yet settled. Serious cases can become construction disputes, and at least one major Japanese housebuilder has patented equipment for tracing the noise to its source.