A yokai depicted by the Edo-period artist Toriyama Sekien in his Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro. It appears as a female badger (mujina) carrying a night-duty bag, but given the book’s focus on tool-spirits, many read the bag itself as the true body. The design satirizes the saying “ana no mujina no nao o suru,” which warns that judging what you haven’t seen is difficult, and likely reworks a court-lady figure carrying a bag found in earlier night-parade scrolls.
Folklore & Legends
There are few place-based folktales tied to it. Its precedent is thought to be a court-lady-like yokai carrying a bag in Muromachi-period Hyakki Yagyō picture scrolls, which Sekien adapted and imbued with allegory. Citing the proverb “ana no mujina no nao o suru,” the image cautions against careless guesswork. Because Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro centers on tool-spirits, a popular interpretation treats the bag as the main entity, though its ultimate nature remains uncertain.
A version grounded in the image and brief annotation from Toriyama Sekien’s Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro. It appears as a womanly mujina carrying a night-duty bag over her shoulder, yet from another angle the bag itself may be the yokai, with the porter’s pose serving as a metaphor. Its conduct lures people into rash judgments and lays bare the absurdity of empty speculation. Actual harm is slight, limited to confronting those who “rummage in the bag” of guesswork on night roads or in parlors and leaving them disgraced. True to picture-scroll lineage, no fixed era or locale is given, favoring witty identification and playful satire.
Character Profile
This section is our own creative profile for storytelling. It is not historical fact or scholarship.
The diagram below is a diagnostic evaluation chart for Annotated Iconography Edition (Seiyan-Toriyama Based). The higher the value of each item, the stronger that characteristic is expressed.
Meet your guardian yokai at the shrine
Draw an omikuji fortune and discover the yokai watching over you today.
