Someone is walking alone on a road at night. Out of nowhere, a creature with one eye is there. It attacks, and it eats. This is the noma of Iwami, in western Shimane. Its name is read nōma and written 野馬. The characters are 野 (no, "field" or "wild") and 馬 (uma, "horse"), run together as nōma.
What does it look like?
The sources give it one feature. It has one eye.
Mizuki Shigeru's Yōkai Daizukan (1994) says that nothing but the one eye is known. The name contains the character for "horse." No source says what its body looks like.
The lone walker
Hino Iwao and Hino Yasuhiko list the noma in their glossary, "Nihon Yōkai Henge Goi." Their entry is short. When the noma finds a person walking alone on a night road, it appears suddenly. Then it attacks and eats them.
Japan's International Research Center for Japanese Studies keeps a database of strange events and yokai. Its card for the noma sums up the 1929 report. It says the same two things. The noma has one eye, and it takes and eats people. The card files it under Ōnan town, in Ōchi District. The card names the prefecture as Tottori. That is a slip. Ōchi District and Ōnan are in Shimane.
The woman at the tatara
The oldest written story is set at a tatara, a traditional iron-smelting furnace. It comes from Hinui village, in Ōchi District.
One night a man was sleeping at the tatara. He worked there making zuku, or pig iron. A woman came and lay over him.
Then a noma cried somewhere in the distance. It came up to the tatara. It looked in through the window. When it saw the woman, it fled at once.
The woman was Kanayago-san, the god of the tatara. In this story, the presence of the furnace god is enough. The noma does not stay to fight.
Where it comes from
The noma first appears in print in 1929. A writer named Takemoto (竹本健夫) sent a report called "Iwami yori (1)," or "From Iwami." It ran in the journal Minzokugaku, volume 1, number 4, dated 10 October 1929. The tatara story comes from that report. It is the earliest source traced for the noma.
Mizuki Shigeru thought the creature might be much older than its paper trail. Old kagura, sacred dances, survive in the region where it is told. He took that as a sign of a very old yokai. That was his guess, not a finding.
Mizuki also pointed far to the north, to an Ainu tale. Two brothers stayed in a hut by the sea. A big one-eyed monster came and ate the elder brother. The next night, villagers killed it. It turned out to be a giant otter. The tale is in Chiri Mashiho's Ainu Mintanshū.
Japanese Wikipedia links the noma to other one-eyed figures. One is hitotsume-kozō, the one-eyed boy. Another is the one-eyed, man-eating oni of Ayō, in the Izumo Fudoki. One reading is that the noma belongs to that old line of one-eyed eaters. The sources set them side by side, but do not join them.
Go deeper
Books worth owning if this world pulls you in.
- The Book of Yokai →Michael Dylan FosterThe most readable scholarly introduction to yokai — where they come from, what they mean, and the major creatures.
- 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.
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Noma today
The noma lives mostly in reference books. Mizuki put it in his Zusetsu Nihon Yōkai Taizen (1994). The Hino glossary was reprinted in Dōbutsu Yōkaitan in 2006. The Nichibunken database keeps the 1929 report on file.
The oldest of them goes back to one night in Hinui. A man slept by the furnace. A woman lay over him. Something one-eyed looked in through the window, and ran.
