Hari-onago.

Hari-onago (針女子, はりおなご) first appears as a solitary woman on the road, the kind of figure whose presence in an isolated place already feels slightly wrong. The true sign of the yokai is her hair. Instead of remaining a mark of feminine beauty, it hardens into hooks, needles, or sharp strands that can strike outward once the victim is close enough to be caught off guard.

That shift from ordinary hair to weapon is the figure's whole logic. Hari-onago does not need a monstrous body from the start. She becomes dangerous by corrupting one of the most familiar elements of female presentation, turning softness, length, and ornament into penetration and snare. The effect is intimate and sudden, which suits roadside horror better than brute force.

Hari-onago is a path yokai. She depends on encounter, surprise, and distance closing too quickly. A traveler sees a woman, perhaps hesitates, perhaps approaches, and only then discovers that the most visible part of her body is also the means of attack. Folklore often keeps the scene simple because the mechanism is already memorable. The danger lies in being drawn into range before the eye correctly reads what it sees.

Because of that, the best defense is caution rather than heroism. The isolated road is already a compromised place, and hari-onago punishes the assumption that every solitary figure can be understood by ordinary social rules. She belongs to the long Japanese tradition of female roadside apparitions whose threat emerges only after the encounter has become personal.