Nami-kozo (Shizuoka)

Nami-kozo (literally "wave boy") is a child-form entity of the Enshu coastal region around Hamamatsu in Shizuoka Prefecture. In the representative tale, a fisherman rescues a small boy stranded at a paddy sluice and releases him into the sea; in return, the boy later appears to thank the fisherman and from then signals weather changes through drum-like wave sounds from offshore. Folklorists Yanagita Kunio and Nakayama Taro collected related accounts, and Murakami Kenji's Nihon Yokai Daijiten (Kadokawa, 2005) lists Nami-kozo as a discrete entry. The International Research Center for Japanese Studies Yokai Folklore Database records Enshu cases. The tale is counted among the Seven Wonders of Enshu.