What is tsurubebi?
Tsurubebi is a mysterious fire that appears on mountain roads and in forests at night, as if hanging from a tree branch. It gets its name from bobbing up and down like a tsurube, the bucket used to draw water from a well. Toriyama Sekien drew it in his Edo-period yokai books.
Features of tsurubebi
Tsurubebi is a pale blue ball of fire, and a human or animal face is sometimes said to appear inside the flame. Sekien described it as a strange fire that, though it is fire, does not burn the branches. Legends of it remain in Shikoku, Kyushu and elsewhere.
Links to tsurube-otoshi
There is also a yokai called tsurube-otoshi, in which a huge head or a well bucket suddenly drops from a tree to startle people, or pulls them up to eat them. Tsurubebi and tsurube-otoshi are alike in that something comes down from a tree, and they are thought to be related yokai. As the saying “an autumn day drops like a well bucket” (for how quickly autumn evenings fall) shows, the well bucket was a familiar tool for people of the past.
