Otoroshi: The Picture That Came Before the Legend

What is Otoroshi?

The name is usually connected with osoroshii, “frightening,” or odoroodoro, the tangled, overgrown look of wild hair. One scroll spells it odoroshi. Either way, the word describes an impression rather than an act.

Otoroshi is a hunched creature buried under a mass of long, unkempt hair, with claws and a face peering out from the fringe. It is one of the oldest named yokai in the picture-scroll tradition — and one of the most thoroughly silent.

The scrolls

In 1737 the painter Sawaki Sūshi made the Hyakkai Zukan, “Illustrated Scroll of a Hundred Monsters,” now in the Fukuoka City Museum. Its colophon says it copies an original by the sixteenth-century master Kano Motonobu. It shows thirty yokai, each with its name written beside it, and nothing else. Otoroshi is one of them: a shaggy creature crouched on the ground.

Other scrolls of the same family repeat the figure. A twenty-three-figure Bakemono-zukushi Emaki in the International Research Center for Japanese Studies labels it odoroshi. None of them explains it.

Sekien’s torii

In 1776 Toriyama Sekien included Otoroshi in his first book, Gazu Hyakki Yagyō, and made one change that shaped everything afterwards. He put it on top of a torii, the gateway of a Shinto shrine.

He still wrote no explanation. The book, like most of its entries, gives a name and a picture. Why the creature is on a torii, what it is waiting for, and what happens to anyone passing underneath are all left to the viewer.

Appearance

A heavy, hunched body under long hair; claws; a face half hidden. In the scrolls it sits on the ground. In Sekien it sits on the crossbeam of a shrine gate.

Our illustration follows Sekien: the creature crouched on a red torii at dusk, looking down the path.

Behavior and abilities

The Edo-period sources record none. The scroll gives a name and a figure; Sekien adds a location. That is the full record.

Weaknesses and countermeasures

None are recorded, because no encounter is.

Pictures and later legend

Documented pictures. Sawaki Sūshi, Hyakkai Zukan, 1737: a named hairy creature among thirty, with no text. Related scrolls, including one at Nichibun spelling it odoroshi. Toriyama Sekien, Gazu Hyakki Yagyō, 1776: the same kind of creature placed on top of a torii, again without explanation.

Later legend. Modern books say that Otoroshi guards shrines, sitting on the torii and dropping onto people who pass through with disrespect or without faith, crushing or devouring them. That account is generally understood as having been worked out backwards from Sekien’s picture: a creature on a shrine gate must be guarding it, and a guardian must punish someone.

It is a reasonable story, and it explains why the creature is up there. But the old pictures came first, and for well over two centuries they said nothing. The legend is what people made of a picture that refused to explain itself.