Binbōgami

Binbōgami appears in medieval and early-modern Japanese narratives and popular belief as a poverty-associated kami. A 13th-century tale in the Shasekishū names a Lord Poverty (Hinkyū-den) who is expelled by monks, and later medieval and Edo-period collections and local customs preserve stories in which a household's long misfortune is explicitly attributed to a binbōgami. Urban rumors from the Muromachi period (e.g., a 1481 Kyoto rumor) also frame the being within civic hopes and rivalries between places and their fortunes.

Accounts commonly describe binbōgami as a skinny, dirty old man with a pale complexion, often carrying a paper fan (shibu-uchiwa) and wearing a sad expression; some Edo-period and popular summaries add minor variant details such as a broken geta or fondness for particular domestic foods. When said to inhabit dwellings, it is reported to prefer confined spaces such as closets. Visual details vary across texts and later media adaptations, but the recurring iconography in ethnographic summaries emphasizes an emaciated, shabby male figure associated with domestic interiors.

In tales and customs binbōgami is responsible for bringing poverty, continual misfortune, and sometimes sickness to a person or household. It may inhabit a person or a residence and is described as attachable to objects or drawn by certain household signs in narrative accounts. Sources record that it can be negotiated with: it can be lured out and discarded, expelled by ritual specialists, temporarily enshrined and then sent away, or transformed into a fukugami (god of good fortune) by acts of hospitality. Because it is framed as a kami in many sources, stories emphasize that it cannot be killed but only driven off or severed from a household.