What is nurarihyon?
Nurarihyon is a yokai pictured as an elderly man in fine kimono with a head that bulges out at the back. It appears in the Edo-period yokai books of Toriyama Sekien. Its name is said to come from nurari-kurari, an expression for something slippery and hard to pin down.
The yokai that walks into your house
Nurarihyon is said to slip into other people’s homes during the busy evening hours and relax there as if it were the master of the house, drinking tea or smoking tobacco. The people of the house are so busy that they never realize it is a stranger. Along the Seto Inland Sea coast, including Okayama Prefecture, there is also a story of a round object floating in the sea, called nurarihyon, which sinks when you try to catch it and then bobs up again.
How nurarihyon became the “supreme commander”
Today nurarihyon is known as the “supreme commander of the yokai,” but no Edo-period source describes it that way. The image is thought to have spread from yokai guidebooks of the Showa era and from manga and anime. Perhaps its calm composure, sitting in someone else’s house as if it owned the place, gave it the dignity of a commander.
