Tsurube-otoshi

Tsurube-otoshi is a yokai in which a head alone drops on the heads of those passing beneath an old tree on a mountain road or before a temple at night, like the bucket of a well (tsurube) on a rope. The head appears as a shaven-headed face, an oni face, or a fireball; once it touches the ground it is drawn up again into the tree. The figure stands as a representative tree-top yokai of mountain paths and temple precincts in Kyoto and the Kinki region. The canonical narrative places the figure in a row of cedars, large pines, or before an old temple gate at night, when a head is dropped on a rope as if from a well, descending to the ground and then drawn up again. Cognate cases are told in the vicinity of Mount Kurama and Mount Atago in Kyoto, and in mountain districts of Shiga and Nara. Within the tree-top-yokai lineage the figure is connected with child-snatching and head-taking narratives in some districts. Toriyama Sekien's Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki (Anei 8, 1779) figures the yokai under "Tsurube-otoshi," showing a shaven-headed face dropped from a great tree on a rope, with the inscription giving its place as the northern hills of Kyoto. Early-modern kaidan collections Shokoku Hyaku-monogatari and Kokon Hyaku-monogatari Hyoban contain cognate cases. Murakami Kenji's Nihon Yokai Daijiten (Kadokawa, 2005) and the Nichibunken Strange Phenomena and Yokai Folklore Database systematize the figure. Adjacent dropping-head yokai include tsurube-bi (the fireball form) and sagari-atama, in lineage with tree-top yokai. In Aichi and Mie, where the name is "tsurube-oroshi," the descent of an ancestral spirit is sometimes confounded with the figure. The vicinity of Mount Kurama in Sakyo, Kyoto, remains a transmission area today.