Rokurokubi (轆轤首): The Long-Necked Woman — and the Head That Used to Fly

What is Rokurokubi?

In a farmhouse in Makino, on the shore of Lake Biwa, there was a bride who worked harder than anyone. She was a rokurokubi. That is the entire story as it was told there in 1974, and its shape is the shape of the whole tradition: a person who is ordinary all day, admirable even, and who at night is something else.

What that something else looks like has changed. Today a rokurokubi is a woman whose neck stretches to an impossible length while her body sleeps, the head wandering through the house on a smooth rope of skin. For most of the word’s history, the head did not stretch. It came off.

What does rokurokubi mean?

The name is written 轆轤首. A rokuro is a pulley — the wheel over a well that raises and lowers the bucket — and kubi is the neck. The word goes back to a Chinese traveller of the Yuan dynasty, Chen Fu, who wrote of people in Annam called the feitouman, “flying-head barbarians,” that their heads flew “like a rokuro.” A bucket goes up and down on its rope; a head goes up from its body.

So the oldest rokurokubi is not a long neck at all. It is a flying head.

From flying head to long neck

Chinese books — the Soushen ji, the Youyang zazu, the great pharmacopoeia Bencao gangmu — reported that in the far south there were peoples whose heads could leave their bodies at night and fly. In China the image never changed: as late as August 1889 a Shanghai pictorial ran a report that the flying-head people still existed.

The stories reached Japan and, in the Edo period, spread fast. Then the picture changed. Around the middle of the period the head began to be drawn joined to the body by a thin cord or sinew; later the cord thickened into a neck, and the neck grew long. The flying head became the cord-neck, and the cord-neck became the long neck we know.

The reason was drawing. Edo was the age of the picture book — red books and black books for children, yellow-backed kibyōshi for adults — and a head floating in the air is hard to read on a page. A line from head to body shows where the head came from and where it is going. Once the line was there, it was a neck, and the neck was the joke. In a kibyōshi written by Santō Kyōden and illustrated by Kitagawa Utamaro, Kyōgen suehirogari, a woman pines so hard for a lover who has gone to Kyoto that her neck alone stretches after him, all the way from Edo to the capital. People laughed, and the long neck stuck.

Appearance

The long-necked type keeps a human face, hair, clothes, and body; only the neck is wrong. Edo artists sent it around a folding screen, through a doorway, or up into the rafters above a sleeping body. Toriyama Sekien drew a woman; so did Utagawa Toyokuni; Utagawa Kuniyoshi put a long-necked woman with her mouth wide open into the crowd of monsters in his print of the Earth Spider at Minamoto no Raikō’s mansion. Tsukioka Yoshitoshi drew a man. A woman is the iconic design, not the only one.

The flying-head type looks different: a head and a body with nothing between them. Hearn’s “Rokuro-kubi” in Kwaidan, set five hundred years ago in the service of the Lord Kikuji of Kyushu, is about a whole household of this kind, and Hearn noted himself that Japan had both types and that the flying one came from China.

Our short uses an adult woman at a rainy inn and a continuous stretching neck: the late-Edo picture-book form.

Behavior and abilities

• It changes at night. By day the person lives among others — the Makino bride was the best worker in the house.
• The head goes wandering. On a long neck in the later form; on its own in the older one.
• It is found out. The stories turn on discovery: a traveler wakes, a neighbour sees, a husband learns what his wife is.

What the head does when it wanders differs from story to story. It looks. It startles. In some tales it feeds. There is no single answer, and no single rule about whether the person knows what happens while they sleep.

Is the rokurokubi real?

The flying-head people were always somewhere else — in the far south, in Annam, across the sea — and the reports of them were travellers’ reports of foreigners. Nobody in Edo had met one. What Edo had was pictures, and the pictures are where the long neck was born: in the hands of illustrators who needed to show a head leaving a body and found that a neck did it best.

The Makino bride is different. She is not a report of a distant people; she is a story about a neighbour, told in a village in 1974. That is the form the rokurokubi takes once it has become Japanese: not a race, but a person you know, who is something else at night.

Weaknesses and countermeasures

Each story has its own: wake the body, leave the room, follow the head. None of them carries across to the next telling, and what works against a flying head is not what works against a long neck. The two forms share a name and little else.

Documented tradition and later imagery

Documented tradition. A name taken from a well pulley, for a Chinese account of southern peoples whose heads flew; the flying head reached Japan and spread in the Edo period, was drawn with a connecting cord from mid-Edo, and became the long neck of the picture books; drawn as women by Sekien, Toyokuni, and Kuniyoshi and as a man by Yoshitoshi; told in 1974 in Makino, Shiga, as a hardworking bride who was a rokurokubi.

Later imagery. Modern horror and fantasy standardise the rokurokubi as a woman whose neck stretches like a snake and who hunts at night, and add venom, blood-drinking, and a fixed origin. Those are inventions, and the older tellings are stranger without them.

The neck that everyone knows was drawn to make a joke legible. The thing it was drawn to explain — a head that leaves in the night and comes back — is older, and quieter, and still underneath.