Mōryō or mizuha ( or ) is a collective term for spirits of mountains and rivers, trees and rocks, as well as

mononoke are vengeful spirits (onryō), dead spirits (shiryō), live spirits (ikiryō), or spirits in Japanese classical literature and folk religion that were said to do things like possess individuals and make them suffer, cause disease, or even cause ...

that live in places like graveyards, or

kappa Kappa (; uppercase Κ, lowercase κ or cursive ; , ''káppa'') is the tenth 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 of 20. It was d ...

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. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

. In the

Huainanzi The ''Huainanzi'' is an ancient Chinese text made up of essays from scholarly debates held at the court of Liu An, Prince of Huainan, before 139 BCE. Compiled as a handbook for an enlightened sovereign and his court, the work attempts to defi ...

, 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 th ...

'', 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 . 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 the pseudocereal buckwheat or its culinary preparations. In Slavic languages, "kasha" means porridge or puree. In some varieties of Eastern European cuisine, ''kasha'' can apply to any kind of cooked grain. I ...

, 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 in the

Edo period The , also known as the , is the period between 1600 or 1603 and 1868 in the history of Japan, when the country was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and some 300 regional ''daimyo'', or feudal lords. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengok ...

, 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