Shirime: The Japanese Yōkai With an Eye Behind It

The familiar modern story sends a samurai through Kyoto after midnight, where a polite stranger stages one impossible reveal. This film retells that encounter as folklore, not as a verbatim Edo-period account.

The historical object we can actually point to is Yosa Buson's Yōkai Picture Scroll, probably made around 1754–1757. The lost original is known through a 1928 facsimile. Its caption calls the figure Nuppori-bōzu, places it at Katabira crossroads in Kyoto, describes a face without eyes or nose, and says that one rear eye shines like lightning. 12

That surviving caption does not supply the polite request, the carefully staged robe-drop routine, or a harmless-prank motive. Those details belong to later retellings that turn the old image into a complete dramatic scene; one widely circulated English version presents the encounter in that expanded form. 3

The anatomy is presented through cloth, shadow, reflection, and transformation rather than explicit nudity. The result is an original surreal horror interpretation of the unsettling idea at the story's center: the body may have its own way of looking back.