Hone-onna

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Hone-onna from Toriyama Sekiens Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki .

The hone-onna ( Japanese. 骨 女 ; to dt. "Bone woman") is a yōkai from Japanese stories.

description

In the stories, the hone-onna appears as a beautiful but extremely thin woman in a magnificent kimono , who in retrospect reveals herself as a skeleton . It is said to appear mainly at night or during a storm (similar to the Yuki-onna ) and ambush unsuspecting men. She lures her victim into her house and kills him by completely removing his life energy or by grabbing his wrist and holding it until the victim has become a skeleton.

origin

The name Hone-onna was introduced by Toriyama Sekien in the Yōkai encyclopedia Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki (1779). The text describes her as a character from the story Botan Dōrō ( 牡丹 燈籠 , "The Peony Lantern"), who visited men with a lantern in the shape of a peony for sexual intercourse during their lifetime . Botan Dōrō comes from Asai Ryōi's erotic collection of stories Otogibōko ( 御 伽 ば う こ ) from 1666, which in turn is a version of the main work Jiandeng Xinhua (1378) by Qu You freed from Chinese influences and Buddhist moral lessons .

Legends

Botan Dōrō is about a man named Ogiwara Shinnojō , who one night meets a young woman named O-Tsuyu with a red peony lantern and falls head over heels in love with her. Every evening the two meet secretly to sleep together. The overly curious neighbor sneaks up to the lovers' room to watch them. But when he sees her, he is shocked to find that Shinnojō is holding a skeleton in his arms instead of a woman.

Oral tradition comes from Akita Prefecture about a man who was caught by a blizzard at night and came across a woman in the dark who was carrying a lantern and leading him to her house. When he wanted to thank her, the light from the house and the lantern fell on the woman and the man saw that her face was really just a skeletal skull.

swell

  1. ↑ Michael Dylan Foster: Morphologies of Mystery: Yôkai and Discourses of the Supernatural in Japan, 1666-1999 . Stanford University, Stanford 2003, OCLC 255328225 , p. 222 .
  2. ↑ Murakami Kenji: 妖怪 事 典 . Mainichi Shimbun-sha, Tokyo 2000, ISBN 4-620-31428-5 , p. 308 .
  3. ↑ Takada Mamoru (Ed.): 鳥 山石 燕 画 図 百 鬼 夜行 . Kadokawa Shoten, Tokyo 2005, ISBN 978-4-336-03386-4 , pp. 148 .
  4. ↑ Yamaguchi Bintarō: と う ほ く 妖怪 図 鑑 . Mumyōsha, 2003, ISBN 978-4-89544-344-9 , pp. 78 .
Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus Toriyama is the family name, Sekien the first name.