Nurikabe

Nurikabe ("plaster wall") is an entity that suddenly blocks the way of a person walking at night, an invisible wall rising before them. The representative pattern, told along the coastal fishing villages of Onga District in Fukuoka Prefecture, says that sweeping a stick low along the ground makes the wall vanish, while going sideways extends it and going upward fails. Yanagita Kunio's Yokai Dangi (1956) records Onga-district cases under "Nurikabe." A Genroku-period yokai scroll held by Brigham Young University (identified in 2007 by Yumoto Koichi and others) depicts a three-eyed beast-face under the title "Nurikabe," confirming an Edo-period pictorial layer. Related path-blocking entities include the Fusuma of Sado, the Nobusuma of the Kanto region, and the Nuribo of parts of Tohoku.