Edo Aoandon Legend

The Edo Aoandon tradition is a city kaidan attached to the Hyakumonogatari (one-hundred-tale) game popular in early-modern Edo, in which the entity Aoandon, a female figure in white robes with horns, appears at the end of the round. The game lit one hundred candles or lanterns, extinguished one lantern at each tale told, and held that at the moment the hundredth tale ended and the last blue lantern went out, a real apparition appeared in the room. Toriyama Sekien's yokai pictures show Aoandon as a white-robed, horned female figure standing beside a blue lantern, personifying the taboo of the game itself. The tradition turns on three stages: the hundred lanterns and the hundred tales, the tension as the lights are extinguished one by one, and the appearance of the entity by the last blue lantern. The Heian-period notion that "to speak of marvels is to call marvels" finds ritual form in this game, and the custom of leaving the hundredth tale untold is said to derive from it. Toriyama Sekien's Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki (Anei 8, 1779) is the textual source; the kaidan corpus around Asai Ryoi's Otogi Boko (1666) and Shokoku Hyaku Monogatari (1677) backs the kaidan circle.