Yanari: The Small Oni Who Make a House Creak
鳴屋（やなり） Yanari ASCII: Yanari
Pronunciation: YAH-nah-ree
Sekien's 1776 plate shows a crew of small oni at the posts and under the veranda of a wooden house, pushing at the timbers. He named them for the sound a house makes at night and wrote nothing else.
Quick Facts
- Habitat
- House
- Region
- unspecified
- Recorded period
- Toriyama Sekien's Gazu Hyakki Yagyō (1776)
- Nature
- Unknown
- Danger rating
The danger rating is an editorial summary made for readability. It is not an objective measure found in folklore sources.
Watch the Short
What is Yanari?
Ya is a house. Nari is a sound, a rumbling or ringing. Yanari is the noise a house makes: the creak of a post, the crack of a beam settling in the cold, the groan in the timbers that nobody caused.
In 1776 Toriyama Sekien gave that noise a crew. His first illustrated collection, Gazu Hyakki Yagyō, includes a plate titled 鳴屋 — “the sounding house” — in which several small oni have gathered around a wooden building.
The plate
The oni are small and stocky, horned, nearly naked. They cluster at the posts and under the edge of the raised veranda, gripping the timbers. Whether they are shoving the house or holding it up is hard to say; their posture works either way, and that ambiguity is part of the charm.
There is no person in the picture. There is no caption beneath it. Like most of the entries in this first book, Yanari is a name and an image, printed on a spread facing Ubume, and nothing more.
Appearance
A handful of little oni, working in a group. Our illustration follows the plate: a wooden house at night, rain on the boards, the crew crouched under the veranda and up on the beams, bracing their shoulders against the structure.
Behavior and abilities
- They make the house sound. The name says so, and the plate shows them at the parts of a house that creak.
- They work together. Sekien draws several, not one. Yanari is a crew, not a creature.
That is all the source allows. The plate shows no victim, no resident, no attack, and no conversation among the oni.
Weaknesses and countermeasures
None are recorded. There is nothing in the plate to defend against — only the reason for a sound everyone has heard.
Documented plate and later imagery
Documented plate. Toriyama Sekien, Gazu Hyakki Yagyō, 1776, Yō volume: small oni gathered at the posts and veranda of a wooden house, under the name 鳴屋. No explanatory text accompanies it.
Later imagery. Modern yokai books often compare Yanari to the European poltergeist — a noisy spirit that knocks and rattles in the home — and some add a household that is plagued or a family that is driven out. The comparison is a useful one for readers today, and it is not Sekien’s. His page has no haunting, only an explanation.
The plate is closer to a joke than a warning. Every old house creaks at night. Sekien simply drew who was doing it.
Sources and further reading
- Library Gazu Hyakki Yagyō (画図百鬼夜行) (external link) National Diet Library Search Bibliographic record for the historical picture book associated with Sekien's kodama image.
- Museum Gazu Hyakki Yagyō, Yō volume (external link) Kawasaki City Museum Archive The Yō volume of the 1776 book, carrying the Yanari and Ubume spread.
- Museum Yanari by Toriyama Sekien (external link) Wikimedia Commons The 1776 plate of small oni gathered under the eaves and posts of a house; no caption.
- Library Toriyama Sekien's Illustrated Night Parade of the Demon Horde (external link) National Diet Library Image Bank Overview of Sekien's four illustrated collections, including the 1781 Konjaku Hyakki Shūi that carries the Shinkirō plate.
Related yokai
Makura-gaeshi
枕返し（まくらがえし）
From Niigata in 1935 to Ibaraki in 1998, people recorded going to sleep facing one way and waking facing the other. The culprit changes from house to house; the reversal never does.
Tenjō-sagari
天井下り（てんじょうさがり）
In 1779 Sekien drew an old woman hanging upside down from the ceiling, and wrote a caption that is mostly a joke — about a demon who once escaped through a roof, and a phrase for knocking someone flat.
Akaname
垢嘗（あかなめ）
Sekien drew a crouching figure with a long tongue in a bathhouse in 1776 and called it the grime-licker. He wrote nothing else about it — and everything you have been told about dirty bathrooms was added afterwards.