In Ōtsu, on the shore of Lake Biwa, people told of a ball of fire that flew through the town at night. Toriyama Sekien heard that story and asked a strange question. Could the fire be the same thing as a baby licking lamp oil? Modern yokai books answer yes. In their version, the fireball slips into a house and becomes a baby at the andon lamp.
What does it look like?
Abura-akago (油赤子) means, plainly, "oil baby." Toriyama Sekien drew it exactly as the name suggests: a small child caught mid-lick at the mouth of a lantern, an ordinary domestic scene made wrong by the fact that infants do not drink lamp oil and this one clearly wants to. In modern retellings, it wears no human shape outdoors — just a ball of unexplained fire crossing the night sky, one of the many kaika ("mysterious fires") that Edo-period travelers reported and never fully explained.
The oil thief of Hatchō
Sekien's own notes place the story in the Hatchō district of Ōtsu, in Ōmi Province — today's Shiga Prefecture, on Lake Biwa's shore. An oil seller from Shiga village, the story goes, stole oil every night from a Jizō statue at an Ōtsu crossroads: the oil left there as a devotional offering, meant to keep the stone bodhisattva's lamp burning, quietly ended up in his own stock instead. When he died, his spirit became a wandering fire. Sekien then adds his own guess. Perhaps the oil-licking baby is this man, born again.
Sekien did not invent the fire tale; it comes from an older collection, Shokoku Rijin Dan ("Tales of People from Various Provinces," compiled in the 1740s), and the same "oil-stealing fire" story also turns up in the Edo-period text Honchō Koji Innen Shū. Those texts tell only of the fire. In his Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki (1779), Sekien linked the man and the fire to the baby. The result is a tidy, closed loop of a biography: steal from a god, and you spend your afterlife stealing from your neighbors instead.
A family of guilty flames
Abura-akago is not the only Edo yokai built around this exact crime. Ubagabi, an old woman's face burning inside a ball of fire in Kawachi Province, has almost the identical backstory — an old woman who stole a shrine's lamp oil and became a flame. Line up enough of Sekien's kaika and a pattern shows through the ghost stories: oil was valuable, shrine lamps ran on trust rather than locks, and someone, somewhere, kept getting caught with their hand in the dish.
Where it comes from
There is a plausible, unspooky explanation sitting right next to the folkloric one. Rural andon lamps often burned unrefined fish oil, cheap and pungent, and cats are drawn to that smell the same way they're drawn to any fish. A cat balanced at a lamp's edge, licking at spilled oil in poor light, would throw exactly the wrong silhouette — small, pale, crouched — for a half-asleep household to mistake for an infant. Some have floated this as abura-akago's possible seed: an actual nightly nuisance (a cat raiding the lamp oil) explained after the fact by grafting on a moralizing crime story about a punished thief. The fire in the sky and the baby at the lamp may never have been the same phenomenon at all — just two odd things that got stitched into one story because they happened in the same houses, on the same kind of night.
See the original print
Toriyama Sekien drew Abura-akago in Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki (1779). This book has that picture, with its caption in English.
- Japandemonium Illustrated: The Yokai Encyclopedias of Toriyama Sekien →trans. Hiroko Yoda & Matt AltThe complete Edo-period bestiaries that so many of these entries trace back to, in full English translation.
- The Book of Yokai →Michael Dylan FosterThe most readable scholarly introduction to yokai — where they come from, what they mean, and the major creatures.
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Abura-akago today
Abura-akago never left Sekien's page for a life as a mascot or a mainstream monster; it stayed a specialist's yokai, the kind that turns up in yokai encyclopedias and in reprints of Sekien's picture books rather than on a shop sign. It shares that quiet obscurity with most of the Edo "guilty fire" yokai — remembered today mostly by people tracing Sekien's sources back to Shokoku Rijin Dan, still finding the same small, strange image at the end of the trail: a baby that should not exist, doing something no baby would do, in the dark, by lamplight, on the road out of Ōtsu.
