The Enenra: Japanese smoke spirits [Japanese folklore; yokai]
This yokai is a sentient smoke cloud from Japanese folklore. As the story goes, a pauper once lit a fire to repel the mosquitoes from his home. The smoke from the fire was very thin and took on strange and unnatural shapes, eventually taking the shape of an ethereal living being, which was then given the name Enenra, or 'net smoke'.
As such, Enenra is composed entirely of smoke. There’s not a lot of backstory here, and it’s left ambiguous whether there are more individuals of this ‘species’ out there.
Toriyama Sekien, in his 18th century yokai encyclopedia, was the first to give a face to the smoky phenomenon. He gave it a friendly appearance with a large, round, smiling head for an almost cute aesthetic, communicating to the reader that this is not a malicious being. With this, he created the design that most future depictions of this creature would be based on.
Like many yokai in Japanese folktales, it is connected to an animistic tradition where a supernatural identity is given to a phenomenon or object. The Enenra also carries a connotation of poverty with it, because Sekien implied that the smoke is so ghostly thin because the pauper only had a little bit of firewood and couldn’t afford more. The kanji used for the ‘ra’ syllable refers to thin gauze fabric, such as the netting that trappers used.
Sources: Yoda, H. and Alt, M., 2016, Japandemonium Illustrated: the Yokai Encyclopedias of Toriyama Sekien, 319 pp., p. 180. Van der Linden, M., 2018, Toriyama Sekien och hans arv: En analys av Toriyama Sekiens yōkai kataloger, deras kawaii-estetik och Sekiens inflytande på det japanska folkets föreställningsvärld, Linnéuniversitetet, Växjö, Kandidatuppsats, 36 pp., p. 20-22.
(Image source 1: Olivia Leppard)
(Image source 2: Konjaku Hyakki Shui, Toriyama Sekien)
