Mikoshi-nyudo Legend

The mikoshi-nyudo legend tells of a monk-shaped yokai who meets a traveller on a slope or pass at night; the more the traveller looks up, the larger the figure grows, and at the height of looking he is said to bite off the traveller's head. Distributed across Shikoku and the Kinki, the figure in Tokushima is set on the old highways of Awa and the mountain passes. The standard response is to speak first - 'I have seen through you' or 'mikoshita zo' - upon which the yokai retreats; the traveller who hesitates and looks up is taken from above and beheaded. The double meaning of mikosu - to look up and to see through, anticipate - is the verbal core of the cycle, making this a word-play yokai. The structure has three parts: encounter and looking-up on a night slope or pass; the body growing as it is looked at; and dispersion or defeat through the spoken counter-formula. Comparable taller-and-taller monks - taka-nyudo, shidai-taka - are widely distributed in western Japan, and mikoshi-nyudo is the representative of this group. The setting is the Iyo-kaido and Sanuki-kaido in Tokushima and the mountain pass roads, with related variants in Kagawa (taka-nyudo of Sanuki), Osaka and Kyoto. From Toriyama Sekien's picture scrolls onwards the figure was taken up in Edo urban kaidan and spread into Kanto. Sources include Toriyama Sekien's Gazu Hyakki Yagyo (1776) 'Mikoshi' entry, with related comments in Ihara Saikaku's Saikaku Shokoku-banashi, the folklore volume of the Tokushima prefectural history and Shikoku folklore studies.