Furaribi

The pictorial sources that record furaribi do not supply an explicit prose origin. An interpretive theory noted in scholarship and the source summary proposes that some furaribi represent incarnations of fire formed from deceased persons who were not given memorial rites and thus wandered as unsettled spirits, gradually taking on the fiery forms depicted in the scrolls. Separately, a Toyama (Isobe, Jinzū River basin) local legend links the nightly appearance of ghost-lights—called buraribi or Sayuri-bi—to the aftermath of an execution and a deathbed curse, producing a locally situated haunting tied to a named individual (Sayuri). The memorial-neglect origin is presented in the sources as theory rather than an established, uniform origin story.

In classical yōkai picture-scrolls (Hyakkai Zukan, Bakemonozukushi) furaribi are depicted as birds enveloped in flame with a dog-like face; Sekien Toriyama's Gazu Hyakki Yagyō includes an example rendered as a bird wrapped in fire whose facial rendering an observer has compared to Garuda (this comparison is attributed to the source depiction). The Toyama local tale describes atmospheric ghost-lights without detailing a bird-form and reports that, in that story, calling the light by the name 'Sayuri' causes the apparition of a severed woman's head with disheveled hair—a specific local manifestation distinct from the pictorial bird-imagery.

The pictorial tradition presents furaribi as visible fiery apparitions—bird-formed flames that manifest in the human-visible world. The scholarly interpretation tying some forms to deceased persons not given memorials suggests a behavioral role as lingering, restless manifestations of the unmemorialized dead, though this is explicitly framed as theory in the sources. In the Toyama tale, the related nightly ghost-lights respond to vocal invocation: calling 'Sayuri, Sayuri' summons the apparition of a severed woman's head (the local Sayuri), an ability reported only for that specific regional story rather than for all pictorial furaribi.