Izumo Hone-onna Legend

The Izumo Hone-onna tradition is a local variant of the bone-woman kaidan in which a woman unable to release her love after death goes out from the grave at night to visit her lover. While she keeps her living shape on the bedside, the light of moonlight or the inspection of family members at last reveals her bare-bone form. Related tales are widely distributed in the Chugoku region; in Izumo the tale is preserved as a variant tied to local belief in bonds, with shrines such as Yaegaki and Sata in Matsue and Hinomisaki in Izumo, all sites of marriage-tie belief, forming the surrounding folkloric landscape. The structural parallel is Qu You's Jiandeng Xinhua, "Botan Toki" (early Ming), received in Japan as Asai Ryoi's Otogi Boko, scroll three, "Botan-doro" (Kanbun 6, 1666). Ueda Akinari's Ugetsu Monogatari and San'yutei Encho's Kaidan Botan-doro (Meiji 17, 1884) carry the same lineage. Yanagita Kunio's Yokai Dangi, Inoguchi Shoji's folklore work, Izumo regional ethnography, and Shimane and Izumo cultural property materials are the basic references.