The Buru-Buru spirit [Japanese folklore; yokai]
The Buru-Buru is a Japanese ghost who goes around looking for people in scary or fearful situations. She stalks them, invisibly and unnoticed, and grasps their necks when they feel fear. Her touch makes people tremble, and this is supposedly what causes us to shiver when we’re scared.
Toriyama Sekien (18th century) portrayed the creature as a ghostly female apparition with very long hair. She floats and doesn’t seem to have legs, but otherwise appears pretty human. True to her nature as the embodiment of shivers, she is visibly shaking.
The name ‘Buru-Buru’ is a literal onomatopoeia for shivering or quaking. She is also called the Zozo-gami or ‘god of shivers’, and sometimes more liberally referred to as the ‘ghost of depression’. Another name for the same spirit is ‘okubyo-gami’: ‘the god of cowardice’. In modern Japanese, there is an idiom ‘okubyogami ga tsuku’, or ‘being possessed by the okubyogami’ which means turning timid.
It is actually unclear whether the Buru-Buru is a kind of ghost, or a singular individual. This is often the case with Yokai, there is no clear ‘canon’ in folklore after all.
Sekien’s 18th century yokai encyclopedias are usually regarded as the final word on Japanese folklore creatures, but they were as much intended as entertainment as they were collections of yokai descriptions. The entries in his books often included poetical humor (kaigyuaku) in the form of poems, puns and onomatopoeias. In the case of the Buru-Buru, the illustration shows a pun that is difficult to translate: the ghost arises from a hole in the ground where someone apparently tried to uproot a tree. The Japanese word for earthquake includes the same ‘buru’ syllable, so the ‘quake’ ghost arises from the earth, invoking an earthquake. This creature is not technically related to earthquakes though, it’s just a visual pun.
Next time you feel a chill across your spine, remember that it’s actually an invisible ghost floating behind you!
Cucinelli, D., 2015, Windows onto the Supernatural in the Second Half of the Edo Period: from the Gazu Hyakki Yagyo (1776) by Toriyama Sekien to the E-hon hyaku monogatari (1841) by Takehara Shunsen, Ming Qing Studies 2015, 24 pp.
Yoda, H. and Alt, M., 2016, Japandemonium Illustrated: the Yokai Encyclopedias of Toriyama Sekien, 319 pp., p. 142.
(Image source 1: Toriyama Sekien, Konjaku Zoku Hyakki, Vol. 3, 1805)
(Image source 2: Character Design from Yokai Daisenso, 2005)
