Rokurokubi (long-necked woman)
The rokurokubi is a yōkai in human form, usually a woman, whose neck stretches to great lengths. A related creature, the nukekubi, has a head that leaves its body after dark.
Meaning
The National Diet Library calls rokurokubi well-known yōkai with extremely long necks, and notes that Toriyama Sekien and Utagawa Toyokuni drew them as women, while Tsukioka Yoshitoshi drew a male one emerging from a basket. Basil Hall Chamberlain (1905) describes Japanese ghosts whose necks are sometimes of frightful length and twisted like a snake. Henri Joly (1908) adds that the rokurokubi is occasionally shown as a woman with three arms, and that a man and a woman are often drawn together.
Origin and history
Joly traces the idea to China, where the creature’s name was Fei Teou: people whose heads could wander at night, a red mark appearing round the neck the day before; a Chinese general, he writes, had a wife whose head wandered. The Japanese commentator of the encyclopedia Wakan sansai zue said that such creatures existed neither in China nor in Japan. Hearn, Joly adds, found the belief not entirely gone at the end of the nineteenth century.
Two kinds: the long neck and the wandering head
Joly separates the long-necked rokurokubi from the nukekubi, a human head that leaves its body after dark. Lafcadio Hearn’s story “Rokuro-Kubi” (Kwaidan, 1904) is about heads that come off. A samurai who has become a travelling priest, Kwairyō, takes shelter in a cottage in the mountains of Kai and in the night finds five bodies without heads, with no blood and necks that do not look cut. He remembers a Chinese book, the Sōshinki, which says that if the body of a rokurokubi is moved while its head is away, the head can never rejoin its neck. Hearn calls these creatures rokuro-kubi although their heads leave their bodies; the Edo-period pictures the National Diet Library shows, Sekien’s among them, have the neck stretching and the head still attached. At the end of the story Kwairyō buries a head in the grove behind the cottage under a tombstone that, as the Japanese storyteller declared, could still be seen: the Tombstone of the Rokuro-Kubi.
Read next
- Next in Yōkai and creatures of Japanese folkloreKarakasa-obake (umbrella ghost)The karakasa-obake, or kasa-obake, is an old paper umbrella turned yōkai, often shown hopping on a single leg. It is one of the tsukumogami: household things that come to life once they have been used for a long time or thrown away.
- The same shape in Chinese zodiacYear of the RabbitThe Rabbit is the fourth of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac, the animal of the earthly branch mao. The most recent Year of the Rabbit ran from 22 January 2023 to 9 February 2024; the next begins on 8 February 2035. In Vietnam it is the year of the cat.
See also
Kitsune (fox), Tanuki (raccoon dog), Bakeneko and nekomata (cat yōkai), Jorōgumo (spider woman), Tengu, Kappa.
Sources
- TORIYAMA Sekien’s Illustrated Night Parade of the Demon Horde (NDL Image Bank), National Diet Library, NDL Image Bank, Columns: “TORIYAMA Sekien’s Illustrated Night Parade of the Demon Horde”, National Diet Library, Japan, “Rokurokubi”
- Lafcadio Hearn, Kwaidan (1904), Lafcadio Hearn, Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904 (Project Gutenberg ebook 1210), Project Gutenberg, “Rokuro-Kubi”
- Henri L. Joly, Legend in Japanese Art (1908), Henri L. Joly, Legend in Japanese Art: A Description of Historical Episodes, Legendary Characters, Folk-lore, Myths, Religious Symbolism Illustrated in the Arts of Old Japan, London: John Lane, 1908, John Lane (Internet Archive, University of Toronto copy), entry 752, Rokurokubi; “Bakemono”, pp. 15–16
- Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese (1905), Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan, fifth edition, London: John Murray, 1905, John Murray (Internet Archive, University of Toronto copy), “Supernatural Creatures”, p. 443
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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