Who Is The Weeping Girl by the Moat / The Night Soba Seller (Mujina)?
A shapeshifting animal that scares people as a faceless ghost
Mujina
A mujina is an animal once believed to trick people by changing its shape. In "Mujina" from Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan, it frightens people as a noppera-bo, a figure with no eyes, nose, or mouth. The word mujina has been used for the badger and the tanuki (raccoon dog).
The Kii-no-kuni slope in Akasaka, Tokyo, was a lonely road where no one walked at night. One evening an old merchant from Kyobashi sees a girl by the moat, crying with her face hidden in her sleeve, and kindly speaks to her. She turns, strokes her face with her hand — and she has no eyes, no nose, no mouth. The merchant runs for his life and tells a soba noodle seller at a street stall what he saw. The seller strokes his own face and asks, "Was it like THIS?" — showing a face as smooth as an egg. At that moment, the light goes out.
The story never says outright who the girl and the soba seller really are, but from the title, readers take them to be the mujina in disguise. Making the victim think he is safe and then scaring him a second time, it is the most famous noppera-bo story.
Episodes featuring this character2
NEWEpisode 3
She Turned Around. She Had No Face.Mujina (The Faceless Ghost)
KAIDAN, Episode 3. Late at night on a dark slope, an old merchant can't bring himself to walk past a girl weeping at the edge of the moat. He flees from the faceless girl and finally reaches the glow of a noodle stall. But when he pours out the whole story to the stall keeper, whose back is turned to him...
19 pages
NEWEpisode 4
He Didn't Run. He Hid the Body.Rokuro-kubi
KAIDAN: Japanese Ghost Stories, Episode 4. Kwairyo, a wandering priest who used to be a fierce samurai, spends the night with a kind family deep in the mountains. At midnight he finds their sleeping bodies with no heads. He doesn't run. He quietly hides one of the bodies instead.
20 pages