An image systematized from Toriyama Sekien’s iconography and the Heike Monogatari’s accounts of the uncanny. Multitudes of bones unite into a single giant skull, its countless sockets facing the living as if to pierce them. Individual dead bear no names; their fused gaze is read as a trial of the powerful. It appears most at daybreak or in hushed gardens, amplifying fear through sheer visual pressure. The countermeasure is to hold steady and return its gaze. Ritual banishments are poorly attested, and some speak of it as a kind of psychic vision. Said to be memory given form from mass deaths in war and upheaval, its size shifts with the onlooker’s nerve.