Hone-onna: The Bone Woman With the Peony Lantern

What is Hone-onna?

Hone is bone. Onna is woman. In 1779 Toriyama Sekien put the Bone Woman into Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki, the sequel to his first catalogue of yokai, and unlike many of his entries this one came with a precise footnote.

His caption says, in effect: this is the aged skeleton of a woman seen in Otogi-bōko, carrying a peony lantern and keeping company with the living. And it goes one step further back — the original, it says, is “The Peony Lantern” in the Chinese collection Jiandeng Xinhua.

So Hone-onna arrives with a family tree: a Ming-dynasty ghost story, a Japanese adaptation of 1666, and a picture drawn more than a century later.

The 1666 tale

Otogi-bōko was compiled by the writer and priest Asai Ryōi, who adapted Chinese tales into Japanese settings. His Peony Lantern takes place in Kyoto.

A man who has lost his wife sees a beautiful woman pass by at night, attended by a girl carrying a lantern decorated with peonies. He speaks to her, and she stays the night. She comes back the next night, and the next.

The neighbour is the one who looks. Through a gap in the wall he sees the man sitting in the lamplight with a skeleton.

That is the turn of the story, and it matters that it belongs to someone else. The man is not shown discovering the truth for himself. The truth is seen from outside, by a person who was never enchanted.

Appearance

Sekien’s plate shows the skeleton, dressed and carrying the lantern — the thing the neighbour saw, not the thing the lover saw. The peony lantern is the one fixed object passed down from the Chinese original through Ryōi to Sekien.

Our illustration puts both views in one room: a woman with the lantern in the lamplight, and, on the paper screen beside her, the shadow of what she is.

Behavior and abilities

• She returns night after night. The visits, not any single attack, are what the tale is about.
• She is beautiful to one man. How she appears depends on who is looking, and the tale moves between his view and the neighbour’s.
• She carries the peony lantern. It is how she is recognised in every version, and why the story bears its name.

Weaknesses and countermeasures

Sekien records none. In the 1666 tale the one thing that works is looking from outside: the danger can be seen only by someone not caught up in it. What follows that discovery belongs to the tale rather than to the figure Sekien drew, and his caption stops at the lantern.

Documented plate and later imagery

Documented plate. Toriyama Sekien, Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki, 1779: Hone-onna, an aged female skeleton with a peony lantern, identified in the caption with the tale in Asai Ryōi’s Otogi-bōko (1666) and, behind it, “The Peony Lantern” in the Chinese Jiandeng Xinhua.

Later imagery. The story went on to a long career of its own. The Botan Dōrō — “Peony Lantern” — of nineteenth-century storytelling and the kabuki stage added its own characters and plot, and it is now one of Japan’s best-known ghost stories. Modern yokai books often describe Hone-onna as a woman who looks alive only to the man who loves her.

The older tale is more uneasy than that rule. Nobody in it can see her clearly from inside the room. If someone you had lost came back tonight, you would open the door — and it would take a stranger to tell you what you had let in.