This version is based on the Bone Woman image in Toriyama Sekien’s Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki. She is a skeletal woman who carries a peony-patterned lantern and visits the home of her beloved in the late night. The source is the ghost tale “Peony Lantern” in Asai Ryōi’s Otogi-bōko. Sekien visualized its core motifs—the inversion of a lovely face and a skeletal body, and the link between lamplight and erotic affection. Rooted in Edo-period notions of vengeful fixation and shifting appearances common to yomihon and kaidan, the figure is an iconographic type rather than a legend tied to specific locales or persons: not a land deity or beast, but a visualization of a passion-bound revenant. Peonies, lanterns, and night roads are its key nodes. While later lore speaks broadly of walking skeletons, this image stresses appearances born of yearning and nocturnal trysts.
Character Profile
This section is our own creative profile for storytelling. It is not historical fact or scholarship.
Yokai Type - Traditional Yokai
Category - Half-Human Beings
Rarity - Rare
Personality - obsessive, taciturn
Compatibility - drawn to the cover of night, drawn to the scent of incense, drawn to feelings of longing and romance
Abilities - irresistibly drawn to the object of her desire, appears only at night, beguiles the living eye to see her as a beauty, approaches in the company of lamplight
Weaknesses - prayers of virtuous monks, the light of dawn, rites of severing ties and proper funerary practices
Habitat - night roads, rooms of samurai residences and townhouses, near graveyards
🔮Yokai Compatibility Test
For more detailed information and diagnosis results about Bone Woman (after Sekien Toriyama), please click here.