Waira

The waira does not have an origin narrative in the primary emaki sources; it appears as a named image in pictorial anthologies such as Sawaki Suushi's Hyakkai Zukan and Sekien Toriyama's Gazu Hyakki Yagyō (1776). One emaki variant writes the name as はいら (haira). Modern scholarship (e.g., Katsumi Tada) reads the name as linked to characters and meanings for 'fear' or 'to grow meek from fear,' and notes editorial pairings with the otoroshi in visual taxonomies, but these are interpretive accounts rather than contemporaneous origin legends.

In classical emaki illustrations the waira is depicted with an upper body resembling a large ox-like form bearing thick, sharp claws on its forelimbs; all extant pictorial examples show only the upper body, leaving the lower half unknown. Nobuo Tsuji offered an art-historical reading of one depiction as a 'green monster that looks like a changed toad.' Later popular sources add color and sex distinctions (e.g., males brown, females red), but those details derive from modern children's literature rather than the classical emaki.

Primary emaki sources provide no text attributing abilities, behaviors, or powers to the waira; it exists in those sources as a named image without explanatory narrative. Later Shōwa/Heisei period literature and children's books ascribe various behaviors — mountain-dwelling, digging with large claws to catch moles, attacking or eating humans, or identification as an aged toad-spirit — but these attributions are modern interpretive additions (notably popularized in a 1976 children's series by Norio Yamada) and are not corroborated in the original pictorial captions.