Japanese Urban Legends

Rokurokubi

By day rokurokubi appear to be ordinary women.By night,however,their body sleeps while their necks stretch to an incredible lenght,and roam around freely.Sometimes their head attack small animals,sometimes they lick up lamb oil with their long tongue,and sometimes they just cause mischief by scaring nearby people.

Unlike most yokai which are born monsters,rokurokubi and their close relatives nukekubi,are former humans,transferred by a curse resulting from evil or misdeed.Perhaps they sinned against the gods or nature, or were unfaithful to their husbands.In many cases their husbands or fathers actually committed the sin,but by some cruel twist of fate the men escape the punishment and the women received the curse instead,in all known instances the curse of the rokurokubi affects only women, even though the cause of it may not be their own.

Legend:A lord noticed that the oil in his lamps was vanishing at an alarming rate,and so he suspected one of his servants girls to be a Rokurokubi.He decided to spy upon the girls to find out.After she had fallen asleep,he crept into her room and watched over her.Soon he noticed vapors and a ectoplasm forming around her chest and neck.A little while later ,the servant girl rolled over in her sleep,however only her body moved.The head stayed in its placed ,and the neck lay stretch out between the two.The next day he fired her.

She was fired from every place she subsequently worked.The poor girl never understood why she had such bad luck with her jobs,and never found out that she was a rokurokubi .

An old tale from Tomomi tells of a monk who eloped with a young lady named Oyotsu.While traveling,Oyotsu became sick.Treating her would have used up all of their travel money,so the monk murdered Oyotsu and stole the remaining money.On his traveled he stayed in an inn owned by a man with a beautiful daughter.

The wicked monk shared a bed with the innkeepers daughter,and during the night her neck stretched and her face changed into that of Oyotsu, and angrily accused him of murdering her.The next morning the monk regretted his evil deeds and confessed the murder of Oyotsu to the innkeeper,and also had told him what he had seen the night before.The innkeeper confessed that he too had murdered his wife for her money,which he used to it to build his inn and that as a punishment of his own daughter was transferred into a Rokurokubi. Afterwards the monk rejoined his temple,built a grave for Oyotsu,and prayed for her soul everyday.