Okayama Nurarihyon Legend

The Okayama Nurarihyon tradition is a Seto Inland Sea folk tradition of Okayama and Bicchu province of the strange-old-man entity Nurarihyon. The central motif: at twilight, while the household is busy with the evening meal, a finely dressed and unknown old man simply walks in, sits on the tatami as if he belonged, smokes his pipe, drinks tea, and behaves as the lord of the house. The family, puzzled, cannot send him away, and notice eventually that he has vanished. On the Seto Inland Sea coast, a sea-bozu-class entity that rises "nurari" from the sea is also called Nurarihyon; the Okayama Bicchu and Bizen lineages preserved both strands intertwined. The structure has three parts: the bustle of supper as a moment when the household's boundary is loosened, the unknown guest who enters and behaves as the master, and the moment when no one can put him out but no one notices him leave. Boundary, intrusion, harmless: the combination defines a "boundary intruder" who does no harm but cannot be pushed away. The Seto Inland sea-bozu line and the inland old-man line were often combined in early-modern picture-scrolls. Sawaki Sushi's Hyakkai Zukan (Kanpo 2, 1742), Toriyama Sekien's Gazu Hyakki Yagyo (1776), and Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro paint the figure; Okayama Prefectural Board of Education ethnography and Kyogoku Natsuhiko and Murakami Kenji's Nihon Yokai Daijiten organize it.