Japanese Yokai The Kejoro / keyuro

 

A kejōrō’s / keyuro is a Yokai that's most often seen around the red light district near brothels.

The name literally means Hair hooker / hairy prostitute..

Hair(ke) Hooker(joro)

Sometimes spelled yuro..

Her victims are the  men who frequent brothels.

As the story goes,.... A man will see a woman from  behind, he approaches her but when she turns around, her face and body are covered in thick hair, hiding her face. 

Once her victim is shocked by the sight before him, she takes this moment to attack, tangling him up in her hair and using it to slice and cut him up. Though kejōrō-related fatalities are very rare despite the many cuts.

Though her appearance to humans may be somewhat frightening, male Yokai find her very attractive.

In fact she is so popular that male yokai will Often  fight  for her affection.

 Kejōrō sometimes   return this devotion by cutting off some of her hair and sending it to her lover (human or yokai), or tattoo his name into her skin to prove her  love to him.

The earliest records of a kejōrō go back to Toriyama Sekien’s “One Hundred Demons of the Past and Present.” There is some debate over his original description as to whether the kejōrō has a normal face under the matte of hair, or whether she is a faceless monster, related to the nopperabō or the ohaguro-bettari, with various yokai researches weighing in on either side of the question.

In the original stories she's a prostitute whose face and body are hidden behind a curtain of long, black hair. She appears in red-light districts and brothels. In most stories, its only the hair on her head that is abnormally thick and long, but in other versions, her whole body is covered in thick hair, like an animal.

Her appearance is still disputed some say she's a woman with a lot of hair that drapes over her body, others claim she's a strange creature made entirely of hair with no body underneath . She has been depicted both ways, largely at the personal preference of the artist .

,....

The most common telling of the story and the earliest records of the kejōrō go back to Toriyama Sekien’s “One Hundred Demons of the Past and Present

A man is venturing into the Yoshiwara red light district one evening, when he sees a prostitute walking down the street. From the rear, he recognizes her as one of his favorites, and so rushes up to claim her. When she turns around, she reveals her entire body is made up of hair, with no skin visible. “

Toriyama may have been influenced by a similar monster from Chinese mythology, called the Hair Woman (毛女). The Hair Woman is also made up entirely of hair, although she does not have the same connection to the red light district and prostitution. She comes from an old Chinese book投轄録 (Tou Xia Lu-Yu Zhao Xin Zhi; A Grand View of Literary Sketchbooks in the Past Dynasties) and it is not know if Toriayama was familiar with her or not when creating the Kejoro.

More likely Toriyama was making some sort of commentary on the red light district, or playing word games with popular slang of the time. On the adjacent page to the Kejoro of the Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki is another prostitute-turned-yokai, the Aonyobu (青女房; Blue Wife). “Blue Wife” was a derogatory term for a woman who had contracted the kidney disease jinkyo (腎虚; renal ischemia), and it is possible that “Kejoro” was a similar insult that Toriyama turned into Yokai.