Ohaguro-bettari.

Ohaguro-bettari (お歯黒べったり) works through a nearly perfect economy of surprise. At first the figure looks like a normal woman, sometimes even a bride or carefully dressed passerby, her clothing and posture fully legible within the social world of Edo. The horror comes only when she turns or lifts the face into view and ordinary features are gone. Eyes, nose, and expression vanish into flat blankness, leaving behind only the uncanny sign associated with ohaguro, the blackened teeth of mature feminine grooming.

That partial preservation is what makes the image memorable. A completely faceless ghost would already be strange, but ohaguro-bettari keeps just enough of recognizable social styling to make the blankness feel like a betrayal of the ordinary. The result is not animal terror. It is the collapse of personhood inside a familiar human form.

Ohaguro-bettari is a reveal yokai rather than a chasing monster. A person sees a woman at night, assumes a normal encounter, and only at close range realizes that the face cannot return the gaze. The experience is built out of approach, delayed recognition, and shock. That is why the setting tends to remain socially legible, streets, temple margins, or places where one might reasonably greet or avoid another passerby.

The figure also turns a marker of cultivated femininity into a tool of unease. Blackened teeth in historical Japan could signal adulthood, elegance, or marital status. In this yokai those same associations are emptied of reassurance. Social polish remains, but the face that should support it has become an unreadable surface, which is why the encounter destabilizes rather than merely frightens.