Mōryō or mizuha ( 魍魎, 罔両, or 美豆波) is a collective term for spirits of mountains and rivers, trees and rocks, as well as mononoke that live in places like graveyards, or

kappa Kappa (uppercase Κ, lowercase κ or cursive ; el, κάππα, ''káppa'') is the 10th letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the voiceless velar plosive sound in Ancient and Modern Greek. In the system of Greek numerals, has a value o ...

and various other yōkai. There is also mizu no kami as well to refer to them.

Mythology

Originally, they were a kind of spirit from nature in

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

. In the Huainanzi, there is the statement that "mōryō have a shape like that of a three-year-old little child, are dark red in color, have red eyes, long ears, and beautiful hair." In the ''

Compendium of Materia Medica The ''Bencao gangmu'', known in English as the ''Compendium of Materia Medica'' or ''Great Pharmacopoeia'', is an encyclopedic gathering of medicine, natural history, and Chinese herbology compiled and edited by Li Shizhen and published in the ...

'', there is the statement "mōryō like to eat the innards of the dead. It would then perform the 'Rites of Zhou', take a dagger-axe and go into the grave hole, and bring destruction. In its true nature, the mōryō is fearful of tigers and oak, and is given the name 弗述. They go underground and eat the brains of the dead, but it is said that when an oak is pressed against their necks, they die. These are the ones called mōryō." From the point that they like to eat the innards of the dead, in Japan mōryō are sometimes seen to be the same as the yōkai that would steal corpses of the dead, the

kasha In English, kasha usually refers to pseudocereal buckwheat or its culinary preparations. In various East-Central and Eastern European countries, ''kasha'' can apply to any kind of cooked grain. It can be baked but most often is boiled, either in ...

, and there can be seen examples where stories similar to that of the kasha are stated under the name mōryō. In the essay "Mimibukuro" by

Negishi Shizumori is a Japanese surname and place name. It may refer to: * Ei-ichi Negishi, a Japanese chemist who was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry ** Negishi coupling, a chemical reaction discovered by Ei-ichi Negishi in 1977 * Kichitaro Negishi, a Jap ...

in the

Edo period The or is the period between 1603 and 1867 in the history of Japan, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the country's 300 regional '' daimyo''. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengoku period, the Edo period was characteriz ...

, a government official named Shibata had a loyal retainer, but on one evening, said "I'm not a human but a mōryō" and resigned. When Shibata asked the retainer for the reason, he said it was because since it was now his turn to fulfill the role of stealing a corpse, he needs to go to a certain village. The next day, the retainer disappeared, and at a funeral in the village that he mentioned, some dark clouds suddenly covered over, and when the clouds disappeared, it is said that the corpse disappeared from the coffin.

Mythology

References

See also