If you lived in a big Japanese city before modern times
and you wanted a fun night out,
you likely would’ve hit the red light district:
a walled off world of adult entertainment, full of magic, and fun,
and suffering, so much suffering,
which is wonderful because from suffering comes many yōkai.
Yōkai just means Japanese supernatural creature.
There’s one called Kosode no te 小袖の手, or kosode hands.
A kosode is a robe with short sleeves,
but actually this creature can appear in any clothing.
In one story, a man buys his daughter a kimono.
She is delighted but soon strange things start happening around the house.
His daughter becomes so sick she can’t get out of bed.
One night, the man walks down the hall and sees a female ghost,
a ghost wearing the same kimono.
He freaks out and hangs the kimono on a rack,
planning to sell it first thing in the morning.
And that’s when he sees two pale arms stretch out
from the sleeves of the kimono.
While he’s questioning his life choices,
the man sees something odd in the fabric of the kimono.
It almost looks like there used to be a cut across the front, and it was sewn back up.
He realizes that the piece of clothing must have
belonged to a woman whose life ended at the slash of a sword.
The next day, the man donates the haunted kimono to a temple,
and the monks say some prayers.
When he returns home, he finds his daughter dead,
I mean recovered, she recovered from her illness.
Kosode no te come from the clothing of former prostitutes.
Ladies of the red lantern district spent years saving money to buy
their freedom, but most died before they could.
If a woman died before all her clients paid,
her clothing might come alive to collect the debt.
There’s another way this yōkai can come alive. After someone died,
it was proper to pass down their clothing to a family member as inheritance.
“Sakura, your father left you his estate.”
“And Nobu, to you he left his used underwear.”
Or you could donate their clothes to a temple,
and the temple would offer some prayers to help the person in the afterlife.
If, instead, a family member did the unthinkable
and sold the garments (the audacity),
the dead person would have been unable to pass on.
Daddy would have had to live out his afterlife inside his boxers.
Kejōrō 毛倡妓. Hair prostitute.
The idea for this creature might have come from a scientific phenomenon
called Backside Surprise.
It’s when you see a beautiful person from the back,
then you eagerly try to look at the front
and their face hits your eyes like a katana.
From the back, she looks like a courtesan with long beautiful hair,
flaunting a flawless figure that could make a monk
lose his path to Nirvana.
From the front, she looks the exact same,
because you can’t see her face, it’s just hair.
I’ve asked the yōkai community, and no one knows for sure
whether this backside beauty has a face underneath those luscious locks,
or whether there’s no face at all.
Some kejōrō have hair not just on their heads,
but long hair covering their entire bodies.
And for some, their bodies are just hair and nothing else.
Kejōrō sightings are pretty similar.
A man sees a beautiful girl from the back and he runs up to see her face,
only to be horrified that she doesn’t shave.
Most stories end there, but sometimes the kejōrō lovingly wraps the man in her hair,
squeezing him until he’s all sliced up like sashimi.
Even though humans find them ugly,
kejōrō are popular with other male yōkai,
who have been known to fight over them.
Some non-Japanese creatures might not find her that bad-looking either.
You would know a kejōrō is into you if she cuts some hair and sends it to you.
Roses are red Violets are blue
Here is some hair Straight from my b00bs
There’s one kejōrō origin story that I love.
Once in a while, a woman of the red lantern district
might have a client who wants to buy out her contract and put a ring on her,
but the guy’s not sure if she’s playing him like a shamisen.
It’s hard to convince a man that your love is true
when your love is also smeared on 10 other men everyday,
so these women found creative ways to prove their devotion.
One technique was to shave her own head and tattoo her lover’s name on her body.
Nothing kills a client’s little samurai faster than seeing another man’s
name moving rhythmically in front of his face.
Sadly, this wasn’t always enough,
and many women not only lost their chance at freedom,
but also their income.
If this happened, I know what you’re thinking,
did all that shaved hair go to waste?
Fortunately no, all that shaved hair turned into a kejōrō.
Ōkamuro 大禿 or Ōkaburo. It means great kamuro.
Kamuro, back in the day, meant apprentice courtesans,
kind of like little girl servants for courtesans.
The yōkai ōkamuro looks like a man crossdressing as a girl servant.
He’s kinda too big for the outfit,
which is one clue that he’s not a young girl.
Another clue is that he looks like a dude.
This yōkai was likely made up to criticize male brothels,
which had on the menu young boys dressed as kamuro.
The ōkamuro often wears a kimono with chrysanthemum designs on it,
which is kinda cute,
until you realize that the chrysanthemum was a symbol for male-male secks,
and then it’s really cute.
Why chrysanthemum?
Because it looks like a b*tt hole.
Here’s one nice ōkamuro story.
One day, a courtesan was trying to put on ohaguro,
that stuff used to blacken teeth,
but it wasn’t prepared right. It wouldn’t stick.
She got mad and dumped the boiling liquid, but instead of a trash can,
she used the mouth of a nearby kamuro that she grabbed.
The black stuff flowing down the throat of the little girl wasn’t a pretty sight,
and she didn’t have a pretty death.
Afterwards, they said at night you could hear the voice of a girl
calling out for revenge.
Taka Onna 高女. Tall woman.
They look like normal ugly women with blackened teeth
who roam the red lantern district,
but they can stretch their bodies so tall it would embarrass their prom dates.
Sadly, they didn’t have prom dates,
because they used to be women who were
too ugly to marry or do secks work.
Their jealousy and secksual frustration changed them into resentful monsters.
These tall women do a lot of useful things with their powers,
like peeking into multi story windows of brothels and even homes
to look at couples getting frisky, and sometimes triples.
A taka onna doesn’t attack people,
but she does enjoy scaring the piss out of clients of pleasure houses.
Their fault for being able to experience the physical affection she never knew.
Some men may complain that it’s unfair for them to suffer
just because the taka onna had a bad life,
but the taka onna would just tell them to take their complaints
and stick it up their chrysanthemums.
Kerakera Onna 倩兮女. Cackling woman.
Kerakera is the sound of cackling. Apparently.
These are huge yōkai that look like middle-aged women in colorful clothing
with makeup as thick as peanut butter and lipstick as smeared as jelly.
Back then, women of the pleasure houses lived
pretty decent lives compared to Rwandans in the Rwandan Geno--
Women of the pleasure houses didn’t live long.
After all the tedious hours and tedious abuse,
not many women reached middle age.
The ones that did were special.
When they died, their spirits couldn’t move on from all that suffering.
The spirit of such a woman turns huge for some reason,
and they walk the empty streets and alleys of the pleasure district
laughing and dancing.
Laughter brings joy to people’s hearts,
but this is an exception, her laughter brings crazy to your brain.
It echoes inside your skull for the rest of your life.
Most people can’t handle it and go mad.
Because they’re weak.
It doesn’t bother yours truly,
because it drowns out the other voices.
Kerakera onna’s are pretty big,
but there are yōkai bigger than mountains.
Click here to see more gigantic titan-sized yōkai.
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