In parts of old Saga, a family might find its bathwater full of hair before anyone had used it. The visitor was the hyosube — a hairy, kappa-like yokai that villages in Kyushu blamed for fouled bathwater and a shriek in the dark that no one wanted to go outside and investigate.
What does a hyosube look like?
Toriyama Sekien drew the hyosube in his 1776 catalogue Gazu Hyakki Yagyō (画図百鬼夜行) as a squat, ape-like figure covered head to foot in shaggy hair, with a wide grinning mouth and small, watchful eyes. Unlike the kappa, it carries no shell and no dish of water on its head — the hair alone marks it, matted and dripping when it climbs out of the river.
An eggplant lover and an uninvited bather
The hyosube's mischief runs along two tracks, and both are oddly domestic for a river monster.
Eggplant was the food it was said to crave above anything else. Farmers offered it the first eggplants of the season to keep it content.
Its other habit was bathing. A house near a river might find its bathwater already grimy, hair floating on the surface, before anyone in the family had used it. The story held that the hyosube let itself into the bathhouse after dark and climbed in, uninvited and unannounced. One story says a horse died after touching that water. Some households drained the bath at night to keep it away. Another says this angered a hyosube, which killed the family's horse.
Where it comes from
One theory ties its name to Hyōzu, a war god of Chinese origin enshrined at Hyōzu shrines. Others link the name to its "hyō-hyō" cry. In the Hyōzu reading, the hyosube was once one of the god's attendants — part of the be, the hereditary service clans of ancient Japan, that group's very name folded into the yokai's own. Left behind when the god's worship faded or moved on, the servant went wild, took to the rivers, and turned into the hairy, grinning creature that raided gardens and bathhouses. It is, in that reading, a divine retainer gone feral rather than a river god cut down to size the way scholars often describe the kappa.
The hyosube stayed a Kyushu yokai, told chiefly in Saga and Miyazaki, with reports from Nagasaki too. Folklorists class it as a regional cousin of the kappa, close enough in behavior that later tellers sometimes blurred the two figures into one.
See the original print
Toriyama Sekien drew Hyosube in Gazu Hyakki Yagyō (1776). 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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Hyosube today
The hyosube never picked up a mascot's second life the way the kappa did. It survives mainly in Sekien's catalogue and in the folklore collections that record Kyushu's bath stories, a minor, distinctly local yokai next to its much more famous relative. That narrowness is itself the point: this is a monster that only makes sense once you know which shrine used to stand nearby, and which vegetable patch was closest to the river.
