Noppera-bō

In Lafcadio Hearn's story, the faceless being is not called a but a , which usually refers to a badger or raccoon dog, ascribed an ability to shapeshift. Noppera-bō are known primarily for frightening humans, but are usually otherwise harmless. They appear at first as ordinary human beings, sometimes impersonating someone familiar to the victim, before causing their features to disappear, leaving a blank, smooth sheet of skin where their face should be. As in Hearn's version, nopperabō tales often exhibit the motif of (). Often, a noppera-bō would not actually exist, but was the disguise of a mujina, a fox kitsune, or a tanuki,。 The yōkai nuppeppō bears a similar name and is probably related, though perhaps distinct since it is typically depicted as having a face on its huge head in lieu of any torso, from which the arms and legs stick out. Consequently, ukiyo-e artist and novelist 's woodblock illustration nuppeppō (fig. right) fails to fit this definition (cf. ). ==In literature and folktales==

One tale that hints at some shapeshifting magic beast tricking humans into seeing faceless beings occurs in kaidan collection Shinsetsu Hyakumonogatari (Meiwa 4/1767). It records that the made spooky appearance in Nijōgawara, Kyoto (near ), and since the victims came away with thick hairs attached to their clothing, the events were blamed on the tricks of some furry beast. However, sometimes their real identity is not known, and in the Kanbun 3 (1663) kaidan collection , it was written that in the Oike-chō of the capital (now Muromachi dōri Oike sagaru, Nakagyō-ku, Kyoto), there appeared a noppera-bō about 7 shaku (about 2.1 meters) in height, but nothing was written about what its true identity was. They are also said to appear in folktales in the Osaka Prefecture and Kotonami, Nakatado District, Kagawa Prefecture among other places. The Mujina of the Akasaka Road An iconic story about a noppera-bō (though this name does not appear in the story) is "Mujina" in Lafcadio Hearn's book Kwaidan (1904). The story tells of a man who, travelling along the Akasaka road to Edo, comes across a seemingly distressed and weeping young woman near Kii-no-Kunizaka (i.e., ) hill, perhaps attempting suicide. He attempts to console her, when she turns around and drops the sleeve from her face, revealing she had "no eyes or nose or mouth". Frightened, he runs down and reaches a soba-noodle vendor. The man winds down and starts telling the vendor of his encounter, only to have the soba vendor turn around and ask if the lady's face was "anything like this?" stroking his egg-like smooth face, making him into a noppera-bō himself. Hearn's narrative does not clarify what the mujina is, merely stating it haunted the Kinokunizaka area, and was witnessed by the old merchant, Toki clan of Gifu According to Sengoku period warlord Mori Nagayoshi (d. 1584)'s autobiographical , when 's lord Toki Mikawa-no-kami () was in his youth and went by the name , he went into the wilderness to hunt and encountered a monstrous yamabushi about 1 jō (10 shaku, about 10 feet) tall. Akutarō wrestled him down, but the ascetic disappeared. He descended from the mountain and came to and began to tell about his encounter to the abbot, when the priest clapped his hand and asked, "was that phantasm something like this?" upon which fiends with white, eyeless and nose-less faces like white gourds began spawning endlessly, and finding himself unable to draw sword, had resigned himself to meeting his death, when a wind blew and the temple disappeared, and he found himself in an open field. == Origin theories ==

Chinese parallels Qing dynasty writer Ji Yun's Notes of the Thatched Abode of Close Observations was written in five parts, and Part 2, entitled So Have I Heard (, 1791) contains a story that happened at the old residence of Cuizhuang, where a slave named Zhang Yunhui () while fetching tea utensils for his master saw a young girl with long hair hidden in the tree shade. Thinking he caught a maidservant (slacking off) he grabbed her, when she showed her face, which was completely white without ears, eyes, mouth, or nose. Tattle talks ensued, and some said such things have been heard of, others suggested that the girl cleverly shrouded her face with a piece of fabric. The other tale involves rabbit-like specters. Minakata Kumagusu gave opinion that since the old narrative attested in the 16th century Kaneyama-ki () already uses the expression "face like a white gourd, without nose or eyes", Hearn's phraseology "face―which therewith became like unto an Egg" was probably just a rehash. Hearn scholar Masaru Tōda argues that it was probably improvisation on Hearn's part to transpose the "recurrent spooking" motif to the nopperabō tale. He argues that traditionally the motif had only been used with other monsters, like the oni or ogre types. Although there are regional nopperabō tales with the double-spooking motif, Tōda notes they have been collected or published after Hearn, and cannot reliably be dated to the remote past, as some folklorists have been prone to doing. For example, the tale published by Iwaya (1935) above（ contains the expression "like an egg", which suggests a vestige of someone who heard Hearn's tale. The tale published 1944 () had excited interest in some scholars in the past as possibly being Hearn's source, since the writer had spent time in the Kumamoto area, but Tōda is skeptical about backdating this tale specimen. As for the tale attested centuries before Hearn () it could have easily been created independently of Hearn, based on pieces of the older (Azuchi–Momoyama period or earlier) tales preserved in Sorori monogatari. == Similar or sub-types ==

Though the nuppeppō is probably somehow related to the nopperabō, the typical nuppeppō has distinctively different features (as illustrated in Hyakkai zukan, , , and Bakemono no e), being a sort of blobby-bodied being with sagging folds of flesh forming eyes, nose, and mouth on a giant face-head it carries instead of a torso, and thus it might be distinguished from the faceless nopperabō according to Foster (2015). However, it may just be that the nuppeppō wrinkled folds of skin merely simulates a face, and it does not actually have any eyes, nose, or mouth. A is a subtype of a nuppeppō said to be a shapeshift of a kitsune fox according to some sources, but in the Izumi area of Osaka Prefecture, an elderly informant insisted the shirobōzu was the doing of the tanuki racoon dog and not a fox, this area being the renowned for the lore of the Shinoda vixen. As there is a shirobōzu ("white priest/baldie/boy") there is also a yōkai called ("black priest") whose only facial feature is a mouth. Both the shirobōzu and kurobōzu are categorized as types of nopperabō in Shigeru Mizuki's essay. The in Yosa Buson's Buson yōkai emaki (c. 1754–1757) allegedly appeared in the ("Chainmail alley") area of Kyoto City. considered it to be just a nopperabō after all. But the nupperibōzu is shown with the distinctive trait of an eyeball in the anus, glowing like lightning. This has prompted Mizuki to give it the name . His embellished cartoon depicts his shirime as stripping naked while carrying its clothes in order to spook a samurai. There is also the ( "woman ogre") from the 11th century novel Genji monogatari, Book 53, which describes it as an eye-less, nose-less being from long ago. Yanagita Kunio's ("supplement", 1935), Story #11, tells the legendary history of the Komagata-jinja shrine in the former (now Ayaori-chō in Tōno city). According to locals, the shrine was founded after a certain traveler came by long ago, piggybacking a flat-faced child with no eyes nor nose, wearing a red hood on its head, and rested on the spot, or had died there. has been classed as a subtype of nopperabō, as this female yōkai is a " nopperabō with a grinning mouth", displaying her namesake blackened teeth () but having neither eyes nor nose. ==See also==