Yokai Encyclopedia

Early modern Japanese accounts of Kaijin drew on two streams of information: reports imported from overseas and descriptions in domestic natural histories. The traditions eventually overlapped. Kaijin is broadly human in shape, but webbing between the digits and loose skin over the entire body set it apart. The skin gathers in folds at the waist and looks almost like a wide pair of hakama. Whether it understands language is uncertain. Most sources say it neither comprehends human speech nor answers, although a variant claims that one survived on land for an extended period. Its diet is equally unclear because many accounts emphasize its refusal of food offered by people. When a captured Kaijin is kept away from the water, it weakens quickly and may die within days. Some have suggested that observers mistook a sea lion or seal for a human figure. Another explanation treats the apparent clothing or folds as seaweed clinging to the body. Neither has been proven. Part of the tradition came through Nagasaki in reports carried by ship, and part came from sightings along the Japanese coast; names and dates differ from source to source, so the material cannot be reduced to one clearly defined animal. Kaijin is best understood as a representative early modern account of an uncanny creature captured at the edge of the sea.

Kainan Hōshi is inseparable from the taboos observed in the Izu Islands on the twenty-fourth day of the first lunar month. It is described as the vengeful dead of maritime disasters. Some origin stories point to a hated island official; others tell of a group of young people killed together in a storm. The resentful spirits cross from offshore in washbasins or small boats, and anyone who sees them may suffer calamity. That night, households cover their entrances with baskets, place branches of holly and tobira—Japanese cheesewood—in the storm shutters, close themselves indoors, and avoid even outdoor trips to the privy. The next day, the tobira is burned and the crop forecast from its cracking sounds and the way the branches swell. Customs differ considerably from island to island. At Senzu on Izu Ōshima, the visitor is called Hiimi-sama and remains the object of shrine rites; one account assigns a particular family to wait beside the shore through the night. On Kōzushima, shrine priests preserve a solemn nocturnal reception that gives the vengeful spirit the character of a visiting deity. On Miyakejima, plates and earthenware are placed at doorways and small children are put to bed early. Over time, these practices became a shared rule for guarding the boundary between sea and community. Stories warn that anyone who mocks Kainan Hōshi or breaks the taboo may encounter strange events or fall ill. Researchers have also noted that related traditions are scarce in the southern islands, so the distribution is uneven. Kainan Hōshi is not a general name for every maritime ghost. It belongs to the calendar, ritual life, and one recurring night of the Izu Islands.

"Kappa" is not, in truth, the name of any single creature. It is a collective term—the word by which the whole of Japan, each region in its own dialect, has called the water spirits that dwell in rivers and ponds. In southern Kyushu it is the Garappa; in Tōhoku, the Medochi; in Shikoku, the Enko; in Chūbu, the Kawaranbe; in Kinki, the Gataro; in Kyushu again, the Hyosube. From place to place the name and the form shift a little, and the total is said to exceed eighty. Some are close to monkeys, some shaggy with fur, some moving in troops. Yet all share a common core: they live by the water, hold water in the dish on their heads, and drag away people and horses. The kappa, in other words, is the shared name of a vast clan into which all the water spirits of the land have gathered. It is the reading of folklore studies that binds these many variants into one. Yanagita Kunio and Orikuchi Shinobu held that the kappa was originally a god who governed water—a water deity—who declined into a yokai as belief in it faded. The fact that in the komahiki legends the kappa always tries to pull a horse or ox into the water may itself be a memory of festivals in which horses and oxen were offered to a water deity in prayer for a good harvest. In Kappa Komahiki Kō (1948), Ishida Eiichirō compared this bond between horse and water deity with myths from across Eurasia. Precisely because it is a god of water, the kappa draws water to the fields, grants fish, and even hands down bone-setting remedies—while also drowning people and pulling out their shirikodama. Its twin aspects, blessing and curse, are the two sides of a fallen water deity. Traces of the water deity show even in the turning of the seasons. Across western Japan it is widely told that at the autumn equinox the kappa goes up into the mountains to become a yamawaro, and at the spring equinox comes down again to the river to return to being a kappa. The field god who descends from the mountains to the villages in spring, the mountain god who returns to the peaks in autumn—that idea of coming and going maps exactly onto the exchange between kappa and yamawaro. In this way the clan’s variants, too, are bound to one another as a single continuous terrain. The clan even has its legend of a chieftain. On the Kuma River in Kyushu the tale survives of Kusenbō, a kappa general who crossed over from the continent at the head of nine thousand kindred. Having drawn the wrath of Katō Kiyomasa, he was driven from the region, moved to the Chikugo River, and became one of the retainers of the Suitengū shrine in Kurume. That a kappa was imagined not as a lone monster but as a clan linked from river to river is plainly expressed in this tale of a boss. Places tied to the kappa are found all over the country. At Tōno in Iwate there is a "Kappa Pool" (Kappa-buchi) where kappa are said to appear, and at Jōken-ji temple, in honor of a kappa that put out a fire with the water from its head-dish, stand "kappa guardian lions" whose heads are shaped like a dish. At Lake Ushiku in Ibaraki the painter Ogawa Usen, who depicted kappa all his life, was called "Usen of the Kappa," and Tanushimaru in Fukuoka styles itself "the birthplace of the kappa clan." In the Kappabashi district of Tokyo a legend tells of Sumida River kappa who came each night to help a merchant pressing ahead with flood-control works. To this day kappa festivals are held in many places, and the kappa lends its name to sake brands and town mascots alike—remaining the most beloved of all Japan’s water yokai.

This version looks closely at the form and nature of the kenmun—kin to the kappa, yet bearing colors all its own from Amami. It stands about as tall as a child, its skin tinged with red, its body covered in ape-like hair, with hair that is black or red. In the dish on its head it holds the water that is its source of strength, and its fingertips, its drool, and the dish itself are said to glow faintly. Where the mainland kappa is bound to rivers and pools, the kenmun makes its home in old banyan (gajumaru) trees and moves between sea and mountains with the seasons—a distinctive character rooted in the nature of the southern isles. Its range, too, spreads from island to island, with its own tellings handed down on Amami Ōshima, Kakeroma, Tokunoshima, Okinoerabu, and elsewhere. In the tales of older generations it was most often a harmless spirit that helped people, but as the ages passed its mischievous, menacing side came to the fore. As the island life lived alongside the forest fades, the kenmun’s own place, too, is slowly drawing away.

Kokū-daiko has no body. The apparition is the sound itself. It is heard most often around June on the beaches and capes of Suō-Ōshima, particularly between the evening change of wind and midnight. Islanders also connect it with the roar of the sea and echoes among the rocks. Natural acoustics and a spiritual event cannot be cleanly separated, making Kokū-daiko a sound apparition rooted in the experience of life on the island. The origin story tells of a boat carrying a troupe of performers that was swallowed by a storm. The people aboard beat their drums fiercely for help but never returned. Ever since, the rhythm has revived over the water in the same season. Some witnesses hear quick, light strokes like a small tension drum; others remember one slow, broad blow like a shrine drum. The sound changes with the listener and has no single fixed rhythm. Some communities avoid calling it an omen of disaster. They press their hands together instead, consoling the spirits beneath the sea. The surviving record gives neither a year for the wreck nor the names of those who died, leaving the story entirely within oral tradition. Yet the drum that seems to retreat when approached and draw near when heard from afar turns an islander's knowledge of echo, weather, and death into a vivid maritime ghost story.

This version looks closely at Kyūsenbō’s singular standing — less a single yokai than the chief of the whole kappa kind. The kappa is by nature a yokai that changes its name from place to place, told of scattered across the rivers of each region. Among them, Kyūsenbō is drawn as the “head” who governs nine thousand kappa across Kyushu with a single hand. This is unlike the fox’s tenko — a vertical ladder up which a single fox climbs through cultivation. The seat Kyūsenbō holds is a horizontal command over many kappa: in plain terms, the authority of a general over an army. That authority is tested in the contest with Katō Kiyomasa. The single battle handed down by the Honchō Zokugenshi reflects at once the kappa’s strength and its weakness. With nine thousand familiars in hand, he is yet helplessly defeated the moment he faces the monkey the kappa has dreaded since of old. The outcome is settled not by force of arms but by the logic of the natural enemy — and in this the kappa’s true nature is laid plainly bare. What comes after defeat is his turn toward the water-god. The Kyūsenbō who moved to the Chikugo River changed from a man-attacking demon into a guardian against flood. His bond of serving Suitengū at Kurume shows the kappa to be a being that bears both meanings at once — the peril of water and the bounty of water. The monument at the Place of the Kappa’s Arrival in Yatsushiro, the kappa masks of Suitengū, and the kappa clan Hino Ashihei founded in the Shōwa era — the tale of Kyūsenbō lives on still, from an Edo miscellany to the town-building of today, as a thread of memory the people of Kyushu have spun together with the river.

This version looks closely at how the medochi, though merely “a dialect name for the kappa,” carries a face all its own, belonging to the land of Tsugaru. Begin with the name. Medochi derives from mizuchi (蛟), which once meant a water-serpent deity. How it came to be the name of the kappa traces a larger current in waterside belief — a water-god declining over the ages, descending step by step from a revered deity into a dreaded yokai. The name medochi carries that memory of decline down to the present day. In its image, too, the Tsugaru medochi stands apart. Where the Edo artists drew the kappa with a beak and a shell, the people of Tsugaru told of a monkey face and a black body. Around Towada they say the medotsu has a red face; color and form waver from place to place. All that holds constant is the stature of a child, and that eerie pull toward the water. What must not be overlooked in matters of belief is its two-sidedness with Suiko-sama. In Tsugaru, the medochi that drags people under (the demon) and the Suiko-sama that quells it (the water-god) are often spoken of as two faces of one same being. In 1934 Orikuchi Shinobu saw with his own eyes the Suiko image at Nagata, had a copy made of it, and held a river festival at Kokugakuin. The figure of “one Suiko-sama for forty-eight” has no scholarly grounding, yet the sense of rank — the medochi governed by a “chief” — is truly rooted in the water-god belief of Tsugaru. Its weaknesses, and the means of quelling it, all come back to its bond with the river. It dissolves at the touch of a hemp stalk; offer the first cucumber of the season and it takes no one; enshrine Suiko-sama and the deep pool grows calm. The people of Tsugaru lived by the water and feared it too — and the medochi, this kappa, is something like the knot they tied of those days in their hearts.

In texts, the Metsuhō Shell appears solely as an image: an enigmatic shell-dwelling creature that emerges around rivers, marshes, and ponds. Eyes peer from the rim of its shell, and a tail-like appendage sways as if propelling it. Its behavior, malice, and omens are not recorded. Late Edo picture scrolls omit explanatory captions, inviting readers to infer origins from its name and form, and set it alongside other water spirits. The term metsuhō evokes a sense of lawlessness or being out of bounds, but no firm source, orthographic variants, or toponymic links are attested. Accordingly, this entry confines itself to minimal notes based on iconographic traits and extant sources.

A generalized classical image of the mōryō based on historical sources. The term was used for uncanny phenomena tied to watersides, graveyards, ancient trees, and great stones, and is understood to be linked with disasters that defile corpses and the spread of death impurity. Its form is not fixed—some accounts call it childlike, others say it manifests only as a vapor or miasma. In Japan, the word came to denote corpse-stealing spirits and served to justify funerary taboos and rites of purification.

This Nami-kozō belongs to the coasts and estuaries of old Tōtōmi Province. Its origins follow two main lines. One makes it a straw doll released into a river by Gyōki; the other tells of a small being that sent signals in the waves to farmers suffering through a drought. It may look like a little child or a tiny doll, but its features are never fixed. Its essential task is to report changes in the weather. The direction and force of the sea's booming sound announce approaching rain or wind, allowing fishers to decide whether to launch and farmers to arrange their work in advance. The story turns a distant, difficult-to-explain roar into practical local knowledge. Ideas about flowing water and dolls overlap here with kappa tales and accounts that use the name Umibōzu. Whatever the name, the tradition remains a way of interpreting the roar of the sea and reading the weather. Nami-kozō is less a deity formally worshiped than a personification of a natural sign worthy of respect. Offerings and rites vary by community, and the surviving evidence depends on local records and oral tradition, leaving many details uncertain.

Iconographic Disconnect from Western Mermaids. The image of a Ningyo that modern Japanese people envision—a "beautiful female upper body and a fish lower body"—is a product of Western mermaid legends (such as Hans Christian Andersen's *The Little Mermaid*) being imported and taking root from the modern era onward. Prior to this, traditional Japanese Ningyo iconography, as depicted in texts like the *Kaikoku Heidan*, was exceedingly bizarre and grotesque: "a human-like (or monkey-like) face on a scale-covered fish body." The facial features were not necessarily those of a beautiful woman; they were generally depicted as terrifying men, women, young, or old, bearing sharp fangs. The sheer ugliness of this design emphasized the visceral reality of the Ningyo as a "creature from the Other World" and the taboo, grotesque nature of the act of eating its flesh. Biological Models and the Natural History Perspective. The core of Japanese Ningyo folklore is believed to contain no small amount of misidentification of actual biological creatures. For example, a prevalent theory suggests that sirenians like dugongs and manatees, or pinnipeds like sea lions and seals, served as the models for the Umibozu and Ningyo. Additionally, in inland (river or swamp) Ningyo legends, there are cases where the true identity is speculated to have been the Japanese giant salamander. Edo period herbalists (Honzogakusha) meticulously collected and classified records of these unknown marine creatures washing ashore, attempting to re-examine yokai through the lens of "science" (natural history). The Curse of "Eternal Life". The "eternal youth and longevity" brought about by Ningyo meat is a universal human desire, yet in Japanese folklore, it is always depicted as two sides of the same coin alongside "tragedy." As the legend of Yao-bikuni demonstrates, one who obtains eternal youth by eating Ningyo meat must repeatedly watch their beloved family members and husbands age and die, forcing them to experience unbearable loneliness and despair (temporal isolation). The Ningyo is a yokai that acts as a cruel mirror, thrusting the "terror of escaping death" directly in humanity's face.

Nure-onna appears beside the sea or a river as a woman with long, soaking-wet hair. The stories vary by region. In one form, she asks a passerby to hold her baby; once accepted, the child becomes as heavy as stone and leaves the person unable to move. In another, she is an imposing water creature with a serpent's body and an immense tail. Edo-period yokai paintings frequently show Nure-onna as a serpentine woman, although narrative evidence for that exact body is limited. In Iwami, she belongs to a cycle of stories involving Ushi-oni, and people are warned not to accept her burden with bare hands. She is sometimes confused with the related Iso-onna, and both her name and her traits shift from one coastal tradition to another.

Spoken of as a haunting tied to canals and irrigation ditches in Edo’s low wetlands, it functioned as both a warning against greedy overfishing and a folkloric device marking taboos on the water. The entity has no fixed form and is often only a voice, though in some regions it is identified with known shapeshifters like kappa or tanuki. Its stage centers on Honjo’s Kinshi-bori and Sendai-bori and along the Sumida River, with variants in Kameido, Horikiri, and Kawagoe. A typical pattern is the three-step “big catch—departing voice—loss of fish,” accompanied by etiquette tales that aver misfortune can be avoided by sharing the catch or releasing a few fish. It appears in curious tale collections and local lore around the Kansei era and later took root through rakugo storytelling. Natural sounds and animal behavior became the raw material of the uncanny, and the tale served to symbolize rules for ditch maintenance and norms for shared resources.

This form gathers traditions in which a Dragon Maiden approaches a traveler or fisher beside the water. She first speaks as a human woman and asks for an offering or a promise. If the agreement is honored, she holds back floodwater and draws shoals of fish. If it is broken, she answers with a muddy torrent or a violent wind. Ryūjo is not opposed to the gods or to Buddhism. At rainmaking rites she may herself be treated as a dragon deity. She changes freely between woman and dragon, yet her body leaves clues: scales, claw marks, an uncanny fragrance, or the touch of garments that remain damp. The Dragon Maiden is not one named being belonging to a single locality, but a figure shared by many stories of water. She gathers water's two natures into one woman—nourishing life when calm and destroying an embankment when angered. The way to live beside her is not to conquer her, but to respect the water and fulfill the covenant made at its edge.

Known as the King of the River, Daisuke of the Salmon marks forbidden periods and seasonal rites during the salmon run. On set dates—such as the fifteenth of the Frost Month and the twentieth of the Twelfth Month—Daisuke and his consort Kosuke are said to proclaim in loud voices. Anyone who directly hears them dies three days later, so riverside communities kept those days as no-fishing days, ringing gongs, singing, and pounding rice cakes to block out the sound. In tales along the Shinano River, a powerful elder who forces taboo-breaking meets a water authority in the guise of an old woman and dies suddenly with the run’s onset, embodying awe of nature and adherence to proper conduct. The old woman is read as a personified river spirit or Daisuke’s avatar, though never revealed outright. The name varies between “Daisuke of the Salmon” and “Daisuke the Salmon,” and his wife is called Kosuke. Recorded from the early modern period in surveys and folktale collections, this motif spreads across the salmon culture zone of eastern Japan beyond specific locales. Creative variants are few, and the core points—voice, dates, taboo, and fatal retribution—remain consistent.

This form of Shiranui appears in ordered ranks before dawn on the first day of the eighth lunar month. Several kilometers offshore, one or two reddish lights first emerge. Coastal people call them oyabi, the 'parent fires.' They split to either side, producing more and more 'child fires' until hundreds or thousands form a single band across the sea. Tradition lets the line extend four to eight ri, roughly sixteen to thirty-two kilometers. It is almost invisible from a beach close to the water but clear from a headland or rise about ten ken above it. Around the deepest ebb of the tide, the lights settle into their most regular pattern, flickering behind the waves like the scales of a submerged dragon. The fires retreat when chased and draw away when a boat comes near. Anyone who tries to capture them sees both light and reflection slip aside, leaving only a direction back toward shore. An old account says that such a parent fire appeared when Emperor Keikō's vessel was surrounded by darkness and turned its prow safely landward. Coastal communities therefore treated the flame whose maker no one knew with reverence. On the night of Hassaku they stopped their nets, rested their oars, and waited for the line to come apart. Although the parent fires are sometimes linked with the presence of a violent dragon deity, they are not said to delight in harming people. Their lesson is against arrogance and haste. A boat intent on quick profit may wander among the lights and finally be forced to furl its sails. Someone who listens to the tide instead climbs a shore pine, studies the rhythm of the flames, and leaves quietly through a break in the line. The shoals then prove unexpectedly calm, and on the return journey a last light may sway against the shore as though welcoming the boat. Villagers call the display Thousand Lanterns or Dragon Lanterns and press their hands together. If people shout its name crudely or mock it, the ordered lights scatter at once into sea fog. Wind does not feed Shiranui as it would an ordinary flame; the lights grow and diminish only with the pulse of the tide. That is why they form a clean band from a cape or mound while vanishing at the water's edge. A seaside shrine rope bending slightly toward the water, or a change in the color of a lighthouse flame, is also said to warn that the offshore lights are beginning. Elders who know the signs tell young crews that the tide is falling and the fire will rise, and advise them not to sail. No ash or smoke remains. For a brief hour after dawn, shells on the tidal flat are said to glow pale rose and dew on the reeds to keep the fire's last color. On such mornings, villagers scatter salt on the beach and give thanks for the lives guided home. The parent fires open a way for those who understand awe and courtesy, retreat from the overconfident, and quietly draw the boundary between human beings and the sea anew.

This version turns to the phenomenon of "kappa possession" that the Shōkichi tale conveys. Most kappa stories play out at the water’s edge, but here the river sumo is carried right into the home. Brought back by his family, Shōkichi went on raging as if locked in a grapple with an unseen opponent—exactly the work, people said, of a kappa that had possessed a human being. A water-spirit climbing onto dry land by borrowing a human body: there lies the spine-chilling fascination of this tale. The means of quelling it, too, reflects the faith of the land. What first took effect was the power of Gō Yoshihiro’s signed blade. The belief that the kappa dreads a keen edge is found in many regions, and the detail that it raged again once the sword was removed shows that power plainly. What finally settled the disturbance was the prayer of a shugenja, an ascetic who trains secluded in the mountains. Quelling kappa possession with these two—the power of the blade and the ascetic’s spiritual force—is a hallmark of Kyushu kappa tales. Hita has gathered many kappa stories, the Hita Gunshi foremost among them, and together with the "Bungo Kawatarō" of the same Bungo, they attest to the depth of this region’s kappa beliefs.

This version digs into what sets the suiko apart: it is not a creature of oral legend but one shaped within the pages of books. Where the kappa was born from the fears of riverside life and took on countless forms and names from region to region, the image of the suiko travelled almost entirely through citations in Chinese materia medica and gazetteers. That is why its defining features stay remarkably consistent — a body the size of a small child, hard scales, the habit of baring its carapace on the autumn sand, and the trick of showing only its knees above the water. Japanese scholars cited these Chinese accounts while puzzling over how to square them with the kappa right in front of them. The *Wakan Sansai Zue* placed the two side by side and cautiously judged them "alike yet not the same," while the *Suiko Kōryaku* tried to file reports of water creatures from across the land under the heading "suiko." Toriyama Sekien's illustration in the *Gazu Hyakki Yagyō* is likewise a picture drawn from this continental learning. There are articles touting ways to capture it or its medicinal uses, but interpretations differ from book to book, and the truth remains unclear. The suiko, in the end, is a second face of the water spirit — the trace left by an early-modern attempt to reinterpret the familiar kappa through the lens of Chinese scholarship.

The Kesa-bō of Igusa is told as a kappa belonging to the local waters, marked by a monkly appearance symbolized by a priest’s kesa stole. Its pranks cause real harm, such as obstructing passage or adding weight, and at times tie into sacrificial notions surrounding the intestines. The listing of neighboring kappa names typifies kappa groups distributed along each water system, accompanied by ideas of mutual visits and marriage ties. The setting centers on the channels near Ochiai Bridge, where nighttime travel was shunned. Later records sometimes confuse it with examples from Miyagi Prefecture, but locally the tradition is firmly fixed under the name Igusa.

This form brings together traditions from Shima, Izu, and Echizen in which a diver sees another self in the water. Tomokadzuki duplicates the witness's face, clothing, and equipment. Only the end of its headcloth, hanging much too long behind it, gives the double away. It appears when cloud cover or fading light has dimmed the sea, approaches with an abalone or another shellfish, and then leads the diver toward the darker side of the water. Ama passed down several responses: do not let fear disrupt the sequence of movements, do not reach forward for what the apparition offers, and wear towels or garments bearing protective signs. None was considered infallible. Some stories tell of a netlike shroud falling over the diver. Encounters overwhelmingly occur during solitary work, which is why many communities regarded diving in company as the safest defense. Tomokadzuki can be understood as a revenant that draws people beneath the sea, but explanations based on delirium, fatigue, and hallucination after long periods of diving have also circulated for generations. Whatever its nature, Shima ama marked their clothing and headcloths with the pentagram and lattice known together as Seiman–Dōman. In Antō, the related umi-ama is also said to move contrary to expectation, never allowing the witness a clear view. The legend gives visible form to a diver's most dangerous moment: alone, disoriented, and no longer certain whether the figure in the water is a companion or herself.

Umi-zatō survives only as a figure in Edo-period picture scrolls and yokai paintings. No accompanying story explains his nature or actions. The composition centers on a zatō standing upright among the waves, with his biwa and walking staff made unmistakable. The impossible posture—feet planted on a surface that will not stay still—is what makes the image so uncanny. Yokai researcher Kenji Murakami calls Umi-zatō a yokai that exists only in paintings and notes that its imagery may overlap with Umibōzu. Beyond that, the sources do not say whether it brings harm or benefit, nor do they preserve any rite or means of driving it away. Only the visual details are secure; what it does, and how anyone should respond, remain unanswered.

Umibōzu is often understood as a yokai born from the fear and unease of people at sea. It has no single fixed form: sometimes it is no more than a black shadow, while in other stories it rises from the water as a colossal monk. One well-known variant has it draw close to a boat and whisper, “Lend me oil.” If the crew complies, it is said to kindle a fire and sink the vessel. Later variants add different details. Some say it has a collector's habit, gathering wrecked boats and fishing nets and piling them on the seabed; others describe it appearing with a glowing bottle or lantern in hand. It frightens those who meet it, yet it also stands for the unfathomable mystery of the sea and is regarded with awe as well as fear.

A Sea Monk told along the coasts of Kyushu and Shikoku. It appears on boats and asks for a ladle, yet it never climbs aboard from the stern, always emerging at the bow. When it clings to the oar, if the crew keeps rowing, the oar bites in like a blade and it cries out “Aitata!” In Uwajima, many tales say it harms people, yet those who see a Sea Monk are also said to live long lives.

A sea monk told across the Chugoku region. In Nagato it appears to snuff out watch fires, while in Okayama’s Bisan Seto it is called “Nurarihyon,” taking a bead-like form to bewilder people. Along the San’in coast it clings to beachgoers and tries to pull them into the sea. The Tottori collection Inaba Kaidan-shu recounts a one-eyed, post-like sea monk that torments people with its slick, slimy body.