Rokurokubi (轆轤首)

§Appearance

A rokurokubi (轆轤首, ろくろくび) looks like an ordinary woman by day. The horror begins at night, when the neck lengthens beyond all natural proportion and the head drifts across the room while the body remains where it lay. In related nukekubi tales, the head separates entirely and flies free. The distinction matters historically, but popular storytelling often lets the two types overlap.

What makes the creature memorable is its restraint. A rokurokubi does not need claws or scales. The terror comes from a familiar human figure becoming geometrically wrong inside a familiar domestic space, as if the room itself had stretched with her body.

§Interactions

Rokurokubi stories usually depend on concealment and delayed discovery. A traveler spends the night at an inn, a husband wakes after midnight, or a monk notices that something in the household moves in a way no human neck should move. The creature may spy on sleepers, drink lamp oil, drift toward food, or in harsher variants prey upon the living. More often than not, fear comes from the witness realizing that the uncanny was present all along inside an ordinary home.

These tales make domestic life unstable. The woman is not encountered as a wild monster on the road but as someone already inside the room, which gives the yōkai its lasting force in Japanese ghost literature.

The standard named rokurokubi belongs most securely to Edo-period kaidan and illustrated yōkai culture. It likely draws on older East Asian flying-head motifs and on Japanese ghost-story interest in hidden karmic deformity, but the stretching-neck woman becomes legible as a distinct yōkai above all through early modern circulation. That is why Edo is the most defensible era tag for the entry.

The related nukekubi type complicates the picture. Some traditions separate stretching necks from detachable heads, while others treat them as neighboring expressions of the same nocturnal condition. Rather than forcing a single rigid taxonomy, the entry should reflect the way Edo storytelling allowed these bodily impossibilities to bleed into one another.

Many rokurokubi tales follow the same slow pattern. A guest notices strange movements after the household has fallen asleep, or a husband discovers that the woman beside him is not asleep in any ordinary sense. In some versions a religious practitioner exposes the monster and traces the condition to karma, curse, or hidden sin. The revelation matters as much as the creature itself. Rokurokubi is a monster of belated recognition.

Nukekubi stories push the same logic further by letting the head fly completely free, sometimes to bite victims or lick blood and oil before returning to the body by dawn. Even when later popular culture merges these forms, the core dramatic idea remains the same: night reveals a second anatomy inside everyday domestic life.

Rokurokubi.

§Appearance

§Interactions

Ningyo

Ohaguro-bettari

Kitsune

§Origin

§Legends

References

Primary Sources