A maid in an Echizen household coughs through the night, and on the third night the mistress of the house takes a lamp and goes to look. What she sees is a head where no head should be. What she does about it is send the woman away on another pretext and say nothing.
Most rokurokubi tales come from books of strange stories. This one was written down by a doctor, who knew the family, and who did not believe in the monster at all.
The account is in the Hokusō sadan, a book of essays by the physician Tachibana Nankei, who travelled widely and wrote about what he saw.[1] He opens by saying that the man of the house was a personal acquaintance, and he gives the particulars a doctor would: the province, the town, the husband’s name, the child’s name and age, the maid’s age, the year. It is not a tale heard in a temple. It is a thing he was told by someone he knew.
The husband, Niiemon, was away from home. His wife, Chiyo, took on a second maid so that the house would not be left with only one servant. The new woman said she had a bad chest, and that it would not keep her from her work.
On the third night the mistress woke to the coughing, took a lamp, and went to look. Above the sleeping maid hung a head. There was no body with it. The woman’s own head lay on the pillow where it belonged.
She waited out the night. In the morning she let the maid go, giving as her reason that with her husband away longer than he meant, the house could not afford to keep three when two would do. The record does not say what became of the maid, or whether she ever knew.
Having set it all down, Nankei explains it away. This was not a monster, he writes, but an illness — the illness of the separating soul — and he gives a mechanism for it: heavy phlegm in the chest, driving something upward out of the body, where it gathered into the shape of a head while the true head never left the pillow.[1]
The cough, then, is not scenery. In the original it is the diagnosis. The one detail that makes the maid pitiable is the same detail the doctor offers as the cause.
Other writers of the period reached other answers. Ban Kōkei, in a book of essays printed in 1801, rejected both the flying head of the old Chinese books and the idea of illness, and held that the skin of such a neck is simply of a kind that gives, lengthening when the body is slack and drawing back when it wakes.[2] The surviving accounts do not reconcile these explanations.
The record gives no reason for the mistress’s silence. It gives only the pretext: money. The retelling in ROKUROKUBI opens the night out — the child, the lamp, the screen, the waiting until dawn — and it is there that the question the record leaves open becomes visible. She could have named what she saw. She paid the woman and let her go.
Selfishness, protecting her own household at the cost of whoever hired the maid next? Or a kind of mercy, letting someone go on living as a person rather than as a thing that had been seen? The record offers no verdict.
In the familiar picture of the rokurokubi, the neck stretches while the body sleeps. Nankei’s account is the other kind: a head apart from the body, with nothing joining them. The single word covers both, and the old writers did not always keep them apart.
When does telling the truth become cruelty? The doctor told the truth as he understood it, and wrote the woman down as a case. The mistress told a lie about money, and let her walk away as a person.
The tale does not choose between them.
The readings in “Reading the Tale” and “A Question Without an Answer” are KWAIDANOTE’s own.
Found an error? Write to kwaidanote@gmail.com — corrections are made on this page and dated.