Rokurokubi Edo Legend

The Edo rokurokubi legend is a yokai tradition in which a woman's neck extends at night and travels through the house, sometimes licking oil from lamp dishes. In Edo tradition, a traveller lodging at an inn wakes in the night to see the long neck of the female innkeeper sleeping in the next room creeping along the beams and licking the lamp oil. She herself remembers nothing in the morning, and the stretching of the neck is read as a deed of her sleeping unconscious. The figure traces its source to the 'flying head barbarian' of Chinese sources, with two strands: one in which the head fully detaches from the trunk (nuke-kubi), and one in which it merely extends (nobi-kubi). The structure has three parts: the contrast between the daytime ordinary and the nightly anomaly; the failure of the witness to be recognised and the figure's own unawareness; and the parting (the traveller's departure or the woman's expulsion) after the revelation. As a yokai whose appearance is bound to the night's house, the figure makes visible the otherness of the unconscious in sleeping bodies, and was often told in relation to the early-modern pleasure-quarters and post-station culture. The figure is a representative female yokai of Edo yokai culture. The central setting is the post-stations and pleasure-quarters of Edo (modern Tokyo). The misemono attractions of the late Edo period featured a 'rokurokubi-onna,' surviving into the modern period as a yokai whose boundary with reality is intentionally blurred. Variants are widely distributed in Kyoto, Osaka and Nagoya. Sources include Gan Bao's Soushen-ji and the Nanpo Ibutsushi for the ancestor; Japanese reception includes the rokurokubi-rich Edo yokai picture scrolls, the 'Rokurokubi' entry in Toriyama Sekien's Gazu Hyakki Yagyo (1776) and figures in Sawaki Suushi's Hyakkai Zukan. Inoue Enryo's Yokaigaku Kogi and modern misemono-culture studies preserve further records.