Gaki.

Gaki (餓鬼) are depicted as gaunt, miserable beings with distended bellies, thin throats, and wasted limbs. Their bodies show the logic of karmic torment: appetite is vast, but the ability to consume is tiny. Japanese scrolls often present them as naked, desperate, and humiliated, licking spilled water or straining toward foul scraps that no healthy person would touch.

Gaki haunt the margins between the living and the dead. They can gather around temples, funerary offerings, and ritual spaces where food is presented to wandering spirits. In Japanese Buddhism they are not merely monsters to repel, but pitiable examples of what greed and attachment produce after death. The living interact with them above all through rites of feeding and release, especially segaki, which acknowledges their suffering while keeping it at a controlled distance.

The figure comes into Japan through Buddhist teachings on the preta, the hungry ghost state of rebirth. In Japan that doctrine became vividly concrete through ritual and art, above all in the Gaki zōshi, where hungry ghosts appear in scenes of filth, thirst, and frustrated desire. Over time, gaki also entered ordinary language as an insult for a greedy or ill-behaved child, but its religious core remains a Buddhist warning about insatiable appetite.