Jikininki
Short story by Lafcadio Hearn / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jikininki (食人鬼, "human-eating ghosts") appear in Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904) as corpse-eating spirits. In Japanese Buddhism, jikininki ("human-eating ghosts"; pronounced shokujinki in modern Japanese), are similar to Gaki/Hungry ghost; the spirits of greedy, selfish or impious individuals who are cursed after death to seek out and eat humans and human corpses.
This article relies largely or entirely on a single source. (September 2016) |
The supernatural species known as Jijinki (or Phantasm) is the byproduct of a pregnant woman outsmarting a corpse-eater. A similar story can be found as "Aozukin" in Ueda Akinari's Ugetsu Monogatari from 1776.