Yokai (妖怪) means Japanese monster or demon or ghost.
I’ve captured 10 of the weirdest ones here in my dungeon, so I can show them to you.
There’s a catch though.
It’s a magical dungeon that exists in a video window.
You gotta watch until the very end.
Leaving halfway leaves the window open, and leaves a chance for a yokai to escape and
come after you.
First off, we have the noppera-bo (のっぺらぼう).
It’s kind of the stuff of nightmares.
Imagine someone who looks like a person, but when you look closer at its face, you see
nothing.
No, I’m not talking about your significant other.
I mean there literally is no face, nothing, just skin.
Don’t worry, it won’t hurt you.
And it won’t be obnoxious and make a mess like other yokai.
You’ll just make a mess in your pants when you see one.
There are a lot of stories about the noppera-bo, many of them follow a pattern.
See if you can guess the pattern.
In one story, a fisherman’s wife warned him not to go fishing in the imperial koi
ponds.
They were sacred places.
But why have a wife if you can’t ignore her? he thought.
So he did.
He went off towards a koi pond in the imperial palace.
When he reached it, a woman appeared and begged him not to fish in the sacred pond.
Again he wasn’t in the listening mood, so she took her hand and wiped away her own face.
Hard to ignore that.
The fisherman freaked out and ran home.
When he told his wife, she had no sympathy and said she told him not to fish there.
And then she took her hand and wiped away her own face.
Another tale involves a man walking on a road at night.
He came across a young woman crying into her sleeves.
He asked what was wrong but she kept on crying and hiding her face.
He kept on asking until finally she dropped her hands and revealed a face as smooth as
a baby’s bottom.
He freaked out and ran away until he reached a soba street vendor.
He told the vendor about the smooth faced woman, to which the vendor said,
“Oh, did she look like this?”
and wiped away his face.
Futakuchi-onna (二口女).
Two-mouthed woman.
Being cheap can be expensive.
There once was a man who lived alone.
He was a stingy fellow.
He refused to marry because it would have meant spending money to feed his wife and
kids.
But one day he fell in love with a woman.
She was perfect.
She didn’t eat anything.
With butterflies in his stomach and dollar signs in his eyes, the stingy man made her
his wife.
But things weren’t all rosey in Discount Marriage Land.
The man found his food stores depleting quickly.
How was that possible?
He didn’t eat much, and she not at all.
He began to suspect that his wife was secretly eating the food.
He didn’t sign up for that.
All he wanted was a woman who didn’t eat to live, was that too much to ask?
One day, instead of going to work, he decided to spy on his wife.
The good news was, she never did put his food in her mouth.
The bad news?
She had another mouth.
The stingy man looked in horror as a second, larger mouth emerged from the back of her
head.
Her hair came to life and picked up rice and food and plunged them into that ravenous maw.
She trapped him in a bathtub.
Why?
Because folktale.
Then hauled him up into the mountains.
He escaped though by hiding in a marsh.
There’s another story about a stepmother who fed her biological daughter, but left
her stepdaughter to starve and die.
49 days later, the stepmother felt a piercing headache, culminating in the back of her head
splitting open into a gaping mouth.
The mouth screamed in a voice eerily similar to her stepdaughter’s, and she felt a hunger
like what her stepdaughter felt before she died.
From that day, the world’s worst stepmother had to feed her second, always hungry mouth.
Akaname (垢嘗).
Filth licker.
These monsters have a long tongue to feed and live off the filth in your home.
They inhabit old bathhouses and worn-down homes.
They love bathrooms and toilets.
Men’s bathrooms, especially, let’s be honest.
All akaname’s who inhabit women’s bathrooms die of starvation.
The akaname can be used to scare children into keeping their rooms tidy.
Live like a pig and an akaname may make your bathroom its home.
Dodomeki (百々目鬼).
Many-eyed demon.
These demons used to be women who were really good at stealing money.
Their immoral acts caused them to be cursed with small bird eyes appearing on their arms.
What do eye-covered arms have to do with stealing?
Well, there’s a Japanese belief that people with long arms tend to steal things.
The eyes are a reference to a Japanese copper coin.
It had a center hole which looks like a bird’s eye.
Having long arms is a Japanese way of saying someone who likes to steal.
And so when the folktale gods thought up the dodomeki, they gave it physically long arms.
Daidarabotchi (大太郎法師).
Giant priest.
These guys are different.
They’re big.
Really big.
Like mountain sized big.
Sometimes they’re mistaken for actual mountains.
I have the same problem with my biceps.
Daidarabotchi look kinda like giant bald humans with dark skin and long tongues.
When they walk around, their feet leave behind lakes and valleys.
Some even say a Daidarabotchi once dug up a bunch of dirt and put it in a pile to make
Mt. Fuji.
That’s why Mt. Fuji lies inside of a basin.
Kamikiri (髪切り).
Hair cutter.
So this yokai...cuts people’s hair.
You may say, “oh hell yeah, free haircuts?
I want that yokai in my house.”
But no, you don’t.
It’s not gonna give you Taylor’s side swept bangs, it’s not a hairstylist.
No, you’re gonna get something like Shia’s pube possum.
These things show up out of nowhere to engage in vicious haircut attacks, ruining job prospects
and romantic hopes for their hapless victims.
Kamikiri can strike anywhere, especially when you’re asleep.
It’s the stuff of nightmares, I know.
Some say kamikiri can be good, and they would attack when a person is about to mistakenly
marry a yokai.
Remember some yokai like kitsune can entice a person to marry them.
A kamikiri haircut assault may happen right before your wedding, a warning from the kamikiri
that you are being tricked into marrying a yokai.
Makuragaeshi (枕返し).
Pillow flipper.
This ghost, usually a small child ghost, haunts your bedroom and flips your pillow.
Meaning while you sleep, it takes your pillow, the one that your head is resting on, not
your Sailor Moon body pillow, and puts at your feet.
Random and weird? Yes.
Adorable? Absolutely.
Sometimes it flips you 180 degrees.
It can move the tatami mat that you’re sleeping on.
It can also leave dirty footprints around your house.
Why do they do these things?
Probably because it’s funny and that should be a good enough reason to do anything.
Makuragaeshi can sit on your chest while you’re sleeping, causing you to be out of breath.
Some say they are the cause of sleep paralysis, which is when you wake up but your body can’t
move because your brain thinks you’re still tied up naked hanging from Scarlett Johansson’s
ceiling.
Where do makuragaeshi come from?
They’re probably children who have died in their bedrooms and now they inhabit their
bedrooms as ghosts.
My theory is that they don’t want you to sleep in their spot.
Nurikabe (塗壁).
Painted wall.
This is a weird one.
So imagine you’re walking along on a street and you bump into something.
Something invisible.
That’s strange.
You try to move around it by going left, but you can’t.
The invisible wall extends left seemingly forever.
You try to go to the right, but the wall also extends right.
You can’t move forward.
You’ve been Gandalfed.
No matter what you do, you shall not pass.
That’s a nurikabe.
Okay fine, there is one way to get around it.
You just take a stick and hit the ground next to it a few times and it’ll go away.
That’s it.
Same way you deal with a child
Originally, the nurikabe was said to be invisible, but as time went on, people started drawing
it, giving it a physical appearance.
Turns out it’s Falkor??
Sunekosuri (すねこすり).
Shin rubber.
Rubber as in “one who rubs things,” not protection.
It’s this cute wil thing that likes to get between your legs as you’re walking and
just cuddle your legs.
They just like to rub up against your legs, dart around them, basically make it hard for
you to walk.
They especially like to appear on stormy nights.
They’re harmless, unless you stumble over them and fall.
In fact, that could be how stories of sunekosuri came about, because people tend to slip and
fall during rainy nights.
Shirime (尻目).
Butt eye.
Imagine you’re walking home at night, and a man steps in front of you.
But on closer inspection, it’s not a man at all because it has no face.
The humanoid creature takes off its clothes, turns around, and spreads its booty cheeks,
revealing an eyeball right in the middle staring back at you.
Quite an eyesore I know.
That’s a shirime.
This yokai is also harmless.
Seems they just want a bit of fun scaring people, they like making spectacles of themselves.
So which was your favorite weirdest yokai?
Let me know in the comments.
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I work on this channel all by my lonesome, with some help here and there from volunteers
like Schadenfraulein, who did the research for this video so big thanks to her!
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and culture, consider pitching in a few bucks a month over on Patreon.com/Linfamy this holiday
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Alright, I love you guys, Merry Christmas, have a good holiday season, and remember to
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