Nopperabo and Mujina: Who Is Faceless in Hearn's Tale?

A man hurries up a dark slope beside a palace moat in old Tokyo. A woman crouches by the water, weeping into her sleeve. He offers help. She turns, and her face is smooth as an egg. Countless readers know this scene, and the story that fixed it in English is titled "Mujina," not "Nopperabo." The word nopperabo never appears in Hearn's own text. That small fact opens the real question of this page: which word names the faceless figure, which names an animal, and which record came first? The answers sit in a Japanese dictionary, an encyclopedia entry, Hearn's 1904 book, and a court chronicle presented in 720.

What Hearn wrote

In "Mujina," from Kwaidan (1904), the narrator describes the Kii-no-kuni slope on the Akasaka Road in Tokyo. An old moat lies on one side and the walls of an imperial palace on the other. Few people climbed it alone after dark, and he gives one reason: "All because of a Mujina that used to walk there."

In the account that follows, an old merchant of Kyobashi meets a weeping woman whose long sleeve hides her face. When she turns, she has no eyes, nose or mouth, and he runs. He reaches the lantern of a traveling soba seller and begins to describe what he saw. The seller asks whether it looked like this, strokes his own face, and it becomes smooth, like an egg. The light goes out.

The word nopperabo does appear in the Gutenberg edition, but only in a note in parentheses, which the edition marks as the digitizer's, not Hearn's. The story itself gives the creature one name: mujina.

Mujina: an animal's name

Mujina is a name for a mammal, and its meaning shifts. The dictionary Nihon Kokugo Daijiten gives it first as another name for the badger, and second as a mistaken name for the tanuki, because the two animals look alike. A Heibonsha entry says that in some regions both are called mujina. It adds that the creature, like the tanuki, is said to bewitch people and to frighten them in the shape of giant monks and other beings. See Tanuki for that animal.

The word also lives in plain speech. The same dictionary records the proverb "mujina of the same hole," meaning crooks of one kind, from a verse collection of 1798, and a use for the bellows of a forge, which were usually made of tanuki skin, from a verse of 1805.

The oldest record is a single line. Aston's English translation of the Nihongi (1896) renders an entry for the 35th year of Empress Suiko, which his pages date to A.D. 627:

"In the province of Michinoku there was a mujina which changed into a man and sang."

W. G. Aston, Nihongi (London, 1896), vol. 2, p. 155.

Aston's note calls the animal "a kind of badger." His introduction, citing a commentary of the early ninth century, says the chronicle was completed and presented to the Empress in 720. This mujina changes shape and sings. It has no missing face.

What the records show

We did not open the books of 1663 and 1767. Wikipedia reports them and says the 1663 text, in a 1989 Iwanami Bunko edition, names no culprit. Treat both as secondhand.

The name nopperabo

Wikipedia says the word comes from nopperi, meaning flat-faced, and describes a figure that looks human but has no face, usually harmless but frightening. It also separates the faceless figure from the nuppeppo, a fleshy blob with a face, drawn in old picture collections. The two names look alike but describe different pictures. Regional names exist too, such as nopperapon in Kumamoto and zunberabo in Hyogo.

The same page says the blank face is sometimes a trick played by a shape-changer. Fox and tanuki are the best-known shape-changers; see Kitsune.

Folk belief and literary story

The folk record for the animal is a separate thing from the faceless figure. The Heibonsha entry tells of a sawyer in a mountain hut who is visited by a woman asking for shelter. She warms her feet at the hearth, and he notices that her white socks are spotless, though she must have walked through mud. He pours hot water from the pot over her, and she dies and turns out to be a mujina. On Sado island the animal is called tonchibo and is thought of somewhat like a mountain god. In the north of Nagano it is banbuku, a hairless-bellied animal that changes shape. In parts of Fukui, young men once held a mujina hunt on the fifteenth of the first month. The entry mentions no faceless figure in any of these.

Hearn's tale is a literary retelling in English, framed as the account of an old merchant, and it joins the animal's name to a different kind of apparition. Wikipedia adds that a Hirosaki tale of the zunberabo, recorded in 1935, says a face became "like an egg," which one scholar suggests may reflect Hearn's influence. We did not check that, and we found no source that measures how far his version spread abroad.

Common mix-ups

• Mujina is not the faceless figure. It is an animal. Hearn's title joins the animal's name to a faceless apparition.
• Mujina does not always mean badger. The dictionary and the encyclopedia show that the word has been used for both the badger and the tanuki.
• The early reports do not all use one name. Wikipedia lists the variant nupperibo for 1767, and the 1663 report names no culprit.
• Hearn did not invent the faceless being. If the secondhand reports are right, Japanese tellings predate him. Wikipedia adds a scholar's argument that Hearn probably moved a repeated-scare motif onto the faceless figure, which we could not check against the scholar's own work.

How to tell what you are reading

• Is the faceless figure named nopperabo, or only described?
• Is an animal named, such as a mujina, tanuki or fox?
• Does the scare repeat, as in Hearn's story, where a second figure plays the trick again?
• Who recorded the tale, and how long after?

Hearn's book also holds his retelling of Rokurokubi, a different tale about a head and a neck.