Keukegen: A Yokai Named for Being Rarely Seen

What is Keukegen?

In 1781 Toriyama Sekien published Konjaku Hyakki Shūi, the third of his illustrated yokai collections. One plate shows a small creature buried under long hair — a moving heap of it, with little else to see.

He wrote it as 毛羽毛現, keukegen, and the characters say what you are looking at: hair, feathers, hair, appearing.

Two readings of a name

Sekien’s caption is almost entirely about the name.

First he explains it plainly. The creature has hair growing all over its body, like Maonü — the “hairy woman” of Chinese immortal legend, a woman covered in hair who lived on in the mountains. So it is called keukegen.

Then he offers a second way of writing the same sounds: 希有希見, “rarely existing, rarely seen.” It is called that, he says, because it is rarely there and rarely seen.

That is the whole caption. There is no account of a sighting, no place, no victim, no harm. The one fact Sekien commits to about keukegen’s behaviour is that you will probably never encounter it — and he gets that fact out of a pun.

Appearance

Small, and hair all over: long hair falling from the top of the body to the ground, covering whatever shape is underneath. Beyond the hair, not much can be said with confidence.

Our illustration gives it two small eyes looking out through the hair and bare feet showing below, standing on a tatami floor at the edge of a room.

Behavior and abilities

• It is covered in hair. The first reading of the name.
• It is rarely there and rarely seen. The second reading.

Neither is an ability, strictly speaking. Keukegen is defined by how it looks and how seldom it is looked at.

Weaknesses and countermeasures

None are recorded, because nothing threatening is recorded. A creature whose chief quality is that it is almost never present does not need a defence.

Documented plate and later imagery

Documented plate. Toriyama Sekien, Konjaku Hyakki Shūi, 1781: a small creature covered in long hair, with a caption comparing it to Maonü, the hair-covered woman of Chinese legend, and punning on its name as “rarely existing, rarely seen.”

Later imagery. The modern keukegen has a home and a threat. It is usually said to live in damp, neglected houses, under the floor or in dark corners, and to bring illness to the people who live there. That description is repeated widely, and it is not in Sekien’s caption. Clear support for it in Edo-period sources is hard to find.

The creature Sekien left is stranger than the one that replaced it. It is a heap of hair with a name that is also a joke, and the joke says it is hardly ever there. If it ever appears under your floorboards, you will be one of very few people to have seen it.