Yonaki no ishi
Yonaki no ishi
Yonaki no ishi (夜泣き石 – The Stone that Wails at Night) is a type of yōkai depicted in the Konjaku Hyakki Shūi by Toriyama Sekien.
This particular stone can be found in the Sayo no Nakayama pass in Enshū.
The story around it says that a pregnant woman was once attacked by bandits and killed here. Her unborn child crawls out of her slice womb, climbing onto a rock where he cried until rescuers heard him.
After this he grew up being cared for by local monks, later becoming a knife polisher in a nearby town.
One day an aged ronin comes to him with a chipped blade, telling him he once hit a rock in the Nakayama Pass decades ago. This is when he realised this was his mothers killer and so he strikes him down.1
External Links
- View the book online here: Konjaku Hyakki Shūi Online.
Footnotes
1. Yoda, H. and Alt, M. (2016) “Japandemonium: Illustrated: The Yokai Encyclopaedia of Toriyama Sekien.”. New York: Dover Publications, Inc.
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