Kokakuchō

The (, "wench bird") is a legendary bird from Chinese folklore. It is described in Chinese texts such as Western Jin natural history book (, "Record of the Mysterious Center", 3-4th cent.), and the Ming period pharmacopoeia ''Bencao Gangmu'' (16th cent.) which collates information from this and other sources.

Nomenclature

The ''guhuoniao'' (, "wench bird") has had several aliases, such as (, "mother's milk bird", or in Japanese, " wetnurse bird), (, "nighttime traveling girl"), (, "celestial emperor's young girl"), (, "innocent bird"), (, "hidden flying"), (, "hook star ); (, "demon bird"), ''yi xi'' (), It later earned the name ( "demon cart").

General description

The wench bird, according to the ''Bencao Gangmu'', is a kind of demon-spirit (''guishen'' ) that takes human lives, according to the "Record of the Mysterious Center".. That is to say, it extracts the two types of human soul, the ''hun'' and ''po'' , according to Chen Canqi (author of the , 739). It can transform from bird to human woman by shedding its "hair" (or down, i.e., removing its feather garment). It is said to be the spirit of a woman who died giving birth to a child. Thus it has a pair of breasts (, i.e., mammaries or " teats") at the front of its chest (even while in bird form).

It has the habit of kidnapping infants to raise it as its own. It flies by night and marks the child with a drop of its blood. This will cause the child to fall ill, with convulsions and an illness condition called "innocent's ''gan''" (''wugugan'', lit. roughly "innocent's malnutrition" or " wasting-away" illness). This infant casualty was purportedly frequent in Jingzhou, China.

The wench bird shares aspects with bird maiden type women in the Western Jin work ''Sou shen ji'' (, '' In Search of the Supernatural'', 4th cent.) who can transform back and forth from birds to women by donning or disrobing their "robe-hair" (, construed as "feather garment"). Added to this are aspects of the ''nuqi'' () of the ''Chu Ci'' (, "Songs of Chu") which steals other people's children. Thus the ''guhuoniao'' aka "wench bird" is thought to be a product of the fusion of several Chinese legends. The Tang era ''Youyang zazu'' (, ''Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang'') notes that the ''guhaoniao'' is a pregnant woman who died in childbirth and turned into a bird, as also given in the ''Bencao Gangmu''.

Relation to Japanese folklore

The bird is also explained in the Edo Period Japan encyclopedia ''Wakan Sansai Zue'' as ''ubume dori'' (see top image). This entry (as many other entries) gives an extract from the ''Bencao gangmu'' account, followed by commentary on the ''ubume dori'' according to Japanese local legend and folklore. The encyclopedist's opinion is that this is no such thing as a woman turned bird, and this must be some bird species formed from the concentration of '' yin'' poison. In Japan, this ''ubume dori'' is supposedly a gull-like bird, with a similar bird-call, which frequents beaches in the West; it appears suddenly on a lightly raining dark night, and a strange phosphorescent fire will accompany wherever it shows, according to the residents of Kyūshū. It is said to transform into a woman with child, and beg humans to carry its child, but the timid who flee may incur its hatred and come down with shuddering chills and high fever that can be fatal. However a stalwart person who accepts the request to carry the child comes to no harm.

There is also a similar legend in Ibaraki Prefecture, where it is said that when a child's clothes is hung up to dry at night, a yokai called would deem the child as her own, and mark its clothes with poison milk from the yokai's own breasts.

As for the borrowing of Chinese name ''guhaoniao'' for the equivalent Japanese lore of ''ubame'' or ''ubume'', one commentary is that the Chinese ''yaoguai'' and the Japanese ''yōkai'' got conflated in the early Edo period (17th century), while another commentator thinks the syncretism with Chinese lore was probably done deliberately by some intellectual privy to knowledge about the Chinese ''guhaoniao''.

Fauna identification

No ornithological identifications are given for this creature in Unschuld's translation proper for either "wench bird" or "demon chariot bird". and Li Shizhen insists these are different birds, However, the companion dictionary to the ''Bencao Gangmu'' lists both and (, "demon chariot bird") as a "goatsucker" i.e nightjar. 2: 404 This concurs with the "goatsucker (nightjar)" identification previously given by Arthur Waley (1960).

The Japanese translation of the ''Bencao Gangmu'' has a marginal note offering ichthyologist 's conjecture that "wench bird" might be a bird of the owl family. It is not clear what this is based on. However, ''Bencao Gangmu'' on "demon chariot bird" may provide certain hints. The "demon chariot bird" is like a ''cang'' ( gray heron), but oddly different, thus called a "strange ''cang''". The bird also looks like a ''xiuliu'' () bird, which is a type of owl () and flies in the dark at night, gathering mosquitos.

Minakata Kumagusu identified the ''xiuliu'' () as a long-eared owl assigning the outdated Latin name ''Strix otus'', and noted that the there is folklore about the ''strix'' in areas of Syria that they enter through open windows and kill infants (whereas Pliny has remarked on the Western myth that the '' strix'' leaves drops of milk on an infant's lips). Minakata suggests that some nocturnal birds with mottled patterns on the chest may appear to have "paps" or lactating breasts, with the male and female often difficult to distinguish in certain species. And since an owl disgorges pellets (hairballs) that might be found in nests, this may have led to a legend in China that the owl fosters clumps of clay, which may have contributed as an element to the legend of the ''guhuo niao'' bird.

Edo Period thinker Hirata Atsutane reflected on the legend of the ''guhuoniao'' dripping blood on a house or a child at night, and compared this to the actual habits of kites, crows, and owls carrying food which sometimes dribbled blood that leaked right through the grass-thatched roof, which was taken as a sign of ill omen in many parts of Japan.

See also

*
* - meaning "Devil Wagon" (also "devil chariot bird"), is the later name given to the feather cloak maidens of Chinese myth (swan maiden type tale). "Devil Wagon" by other accounts is a nine-headed bird
*
* '' Caprimulgus'' - nightjar genus meaning "goat milker" from the myth that nightjars suckle on goats for milk
* strix (mythology) - in folklore squirted milk on the lips of infants
*

Explanatory notes

References

Citations

Chinese mythology
Chinese legendary creatures
Japanese folklore
Chinese demons
Legendary birds