Nurikabe Legend

The nurikabe legend tells of a yokai in which an invisible wall suddenly rises across a night road, preventing the traveller from going forward. A fisherman in the Onga region of Fukuoka was recorded by Yanagita Kunio as saying, 'On the way back from night-fishing, walking straight along, my feet would not go forward. I put out my hand and felt something like a wall, and however I tried to go round it the wall went on. After some difficulty I struck low with a stick and finally got through.' Local tradition holds that one must sweep low, not high, to break free. The structure has three parts: passage on a night road and sudden stop; the touch of an invisible wall and the impossibility of going round; and breaking through by sweeping low. The figure manifests as a pure obstruction of motion, without visible or audible cues, and joins akaname and nurarihyon in the class of sighting and experience yokai. The central setting is the Onga district and the Kitakyushu coastal fishing villages of Fukuoka, with related night roads in the Chikugo paddy belt; comparable nuri-bo and kabe-nuri figures are distributed in Oita, Saga and Kumamoto, forming a northern Kyushu group of boundary night-road yokai. Sources include the 'Nurikabe' entry in Yanagita Kunio's Yokai Dangi (1956), the folklore volume of the Fukuoka prefectural history and the earlier Hyakkai Zukan of Sawaki Suushi; the contemporary image owes much to Yanagita's description and to Mizuki Shigeru's twentieth-century re-characterisation.