What is the aoandon?
The aoandon is a yokai linked to hyakumonogatari, the ghost-story gatherings popular in the Edo period. She is depicted as a demon woman with long black hair, horns and a white kimono. She also appears in Toriyama Sekien’s Edo-period yokai books.
Hyakumonogatari and the aoandon
Hyakumonogatari (“one hundred tales”) was a game in which people gathered at night beside an andon lamp lit with a hundred wicks, told ghost stories one by one, and put out one wick after each story. The lamp was covered with blue paper, giving the room a pale, dim, eerie atmosphere. When the hundredth story was finished and the last light went out, a real supernatural event was said to occur, and that apparition is said to be the aoandon.
Stopping at ninety-nine stories
For this reason, there was said to be a custom of stopping at the ninety-ninth story so that no real apparition would appear. The aoandon can be seen as a yokai expressing how people, even while enjoying ghost stories, feared what might lie beyond them.
