Shokera (Ehime)

Shokera is a yokai linked to the houses and night sky of the Koshin night. The figure has a monkey-like appearance, or a strange beast-form, and is said to peer at people from above through ceilings and gaps in the roof. Toriyama Sekien's Gazu Hyakki Yagyo figures the yokai, and within the Koshin-belief sphere of the Seto Inland coast, including Matsuyama, Ehime, the figure is told of as a house yokai. The canonical narrative places the figure on the night of Koshin-machi (the Koshin vigil), when people stay awake all night; while a household sleeps, Shokera slips down from the roof to watch the conduct of the sleeping. The figure is the visualised form of the Three Corpses (sanshi) worms of the Daoist Koshin belief, which were said to ascend to the Heavenly Emperor to report a person's misdeeds; the figure stands as the unseen watcher in the gaps of the dwelling. Edo-period figural yokai tradition shows the figure as a monkey-like figure peering through a gap in the roof. Toriyama Sekien's Gazu Hyakki Yagyo, "yo" volume (Anei 5, 1776), figures shokera and locates it within the roof-yokai of the early-modern lineage. The Koshin-household character is set out in Murakami Kenji's Nihon Yokai Daijiten (Kadokawa, 2005) and recorded in the Nichibunken Strange Phenomena and Yokai Folklore Database. Adjacent house-yokai of the Koshin Three Corpses tradition include tenjo-name and yanari. Regional name-variants include "shokera," "seirogo," and "shojo-kerai," with cognate cases told in Koshin-do hamlets of the Seto Inland Sea and the Kinai region.