Mōryō

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Mōryō
Mōryō in the 2018 anime
Name
Japanese	モウリョウ
Profile
Species	Yōkai
Gender	Male
First Appearance
Manga	Mōryō (1968)
Anime	Series 1 Episode 31 (1968)
Portrayals
1968 anime	Ichirō Nagai
1985 anime	Hiroshi Masuoka
1996 anime	Ginzō Matsuo
2018 anime	Kōsei Hirota

Mōryō (モウリョウ or 魍魎 Mōryō, lit. a mass of monsters and spirits) refers to two separate entities in the GeGeGe no Kitarō franchise.

• 1. A large animal-like yōkai who appears in the Shonen Magazine story Mōryō.
  2. A gathering of yōkai and spirits that appears in the story Shibito-Tsuki.

Legend

The Mōryō is a general term for evil mountain spirits that eat corpses. They resemble 3-4-year-old children and are colored reddish-black with red eyes, long ears, and bushy hair. They appear near cemeteries, and at funerals, they sometimes pull the dead out of their coffins to eat them. They are afraid of tigers and oak, so placing a tiger statue and an oak branch on top of a grave will ward off a Mōryō.

The Mōryō was also thought to be a water spirit, as the Zuo Zhuan, refers to them as the deities of streams and rivers. In the Wakan Sansai Zue, Chimi-Mōryō, a collective term for evil spirits, refers to Chimi as the mountain spirit and Mōryō as the water spirit.

A long time ago, a government official had a servant to stay with him during his travels. While staying at an inn, the official had a dream when his servant told him that he was a Mōryō and that he was just put on duty to collect the dead. By morning, he paid no mind to his dream and left the inn, where he found a group of villagers in a commotion. When he asked them what was wrong, they replied that they were on their way to take a coffin to the graveyard when a black cloud suddenly appeared on the road and covered the coffin in a flash, and when they looked after the cloud had fled, the corpse inside was gone. That was when the official realized that his servant had disappeared as well.

Trivia

• The main design of Mōryō used in the series was taken from Hihi's illustration artwork. The illustration design for Mōryō was used for Jami in the series.