Shōkera

Shōkera appears in Edo-period yōkai emaki as an image without accompanying explanatory text; because the classical emaki entries (Hyakkai Zukan, Gazu Hyakki Yagyō) give no prose account, later folk-religious texts and commentary retroject the figure into Kōshin-Machi belief. A Genroku-era passage in Kōshinden describes the shōkera as an insect and records one theory identifying it with the Three Corpses (三尸), the internal vermin said to leave the body on Kōshin night to report misdeeds to Ten-Tei. Thus its 'origin' in tradition is a composite: a pictured yōkai of uncertain original meaning later interpreted as a personification or associate of the Three Corpses within Kōshin moral cosmology.

The classical pictorial sources depict the shōkera in a distinctive posture — Toriyama Sekien's Gazu Hyakki Yagyō shows the figure peering in through a house's roof skylight. The emaki entries include no explanatory text and provide no detailed anatomical description; later glosses variously translate the name as 'mole cricket spirit' (reflecting an insect lexical register), but concrete physical traits beyond the depicted act of looking through a skylight are not documented in the primary emaki.

In the context of Kōshin-Machi and later yōkai literature the shōkera is understood as a surveillant presence tied to the Three Corpses idea: its role is to monitor whether people keep the ritual rule of staying awake on Kōshin night, and it is implicated in harm that befalls those who break those rules. Classical emaki do not state active powers; identification with internal 'insects' that report to Ten-Tei provides the ritual-theological mechanism for why harm or heavenly reporting occurs. A modern interpretive addition (from Shōwa/Heisei-era yōkai writings) describes a punitive gesture — a three-fingered scratch with sharp nails — but that detail is a later literary elaboration rather than an assertion from the classical pictorial sources.