Sailors on Japan's Inland Sea once knew of a strange light on the water. It rose off the coast of Mitsugi district, in the old province of Bingo (today's eastern Hiroshima). It was called Takurō-bi (たくろう火). The name ends in 火 (bi, "fire"); the rest is written only in sound, with no agreed meaning behind it.
What does it look like?
Takurō-bi appears as a ball of fire over the sea or along the shore. It shows up at night, from summer into autumn. It is one of Japan's kaika, "strange fires," with no visible source.
The accounts describe two flames rather than one. They appear side by side.
Kurabe-bi: the fire that races itself
That pairing gave the creature a second name: Kurabe-bi (比べ火), "comparing fire." Two lights side by side look like a pair being measured against each other. The folklorist Yanagita Kunio guessed that "Takurō-bi" itself grew out of "kurabe-bi."
No surviving account has Takurō-bi attack anyone. Compare that to funayurei, the drowned dead of Japan's seas. They rise beside a hull and beg for a bailing ladle, then use it to swamp the boat. Next to a funayurei, Takurō-bi reads less like an attacker and more like a sign on the water.
Where it comes from
Central Hiroshima folklore ties the fire to a specific tragedy. Two women died violently somewhere along this coast. Afterward, people said, their bodies became stone: two rocks called Kyō-jorō, the "Kyoto woman," and Chikushi-jorō, the "Chikushi woman," named for the old Chikushi region of northern Kyushu. Their spirits are what still rises from the water as Takurō-bi. Kyoto and Chikushi sit at opposite ends of the old sea route through the Inland Sea. The names may hint at two travelers from far apart.
An early written record sits in the Geihan Tsūshi (芸藩通志), a gazetteer of the Aki and Bingo provinces (together, today's Hiroshima) completed in 1825. It catalogued local place names, customs, and the strange sights tied to them, and the fire off Mitsugi's coast was one of its entries.
More than a century later, the folklorist Yanagita Kunio revisited the story in his essay collection Yōkai Dangi (妖怪談義). His short entry cites volume 99 of the Geihan Tsūshi and notes that people no longer spoke of the fire. He also mentions the Kyō-jorō and Chikushi-jorō rocks, shaped like women, on the sea route along the Aki–Bingo border. Yanagita guessed the fire grew out of the beliefs of boats passing that route.
Takurō-bi today
The story stayed local for nearly two centuries. Then, in 2018, the sixth televised GeGeGe no Kitarō series gave the fire a full episode: episode 21, "Flame on! The Solitude of the Takurō-bi." That version invents a personality with no root in the Bingo record: a lonely yokai exploited as a sideshow act who ends up befriending a robot. It borrows the name and leaves the coastal legend behind.
Outside that one episode, Takurō-bi has stayed one of the more obscure entries in Japan's catalogue of fire yokai, filed alongside kitsunebi and onibi rather than headlining anything. It has no shrine and no festival. What it has is one stretch of coastline, a name that is mostly sound, and two rocks said to be the women themselves.
