Hospitality then entrapment
A motif · Behaviour
5 figures carry it.
Carried by
In this guise she is often described drawing a traveler into her home or into a cave, sometimes by playing a biwa or otherwise offering hospitality, before entangling the victim in strands of spider silk strong enough to bind them in place.
A fortnight later she hears a cart draw up outside her door, and a little man with a long white beard is standing there, entreating her to come and hold her to what she said.
Goomblegubbon persuades Dinewan to give up his wings, on the argument that he would look finer without them, and he does it.
This is a god of small constant compromise rather than of the dramatic bargain — worship as a habit rather than as an event, which is a considerably more plausible account of how idolatry actually persists than any story about a pact.
The rokurokubi appears widely in Edo-period literature, kabuki, and woodblock art as one of the standard stock figures of the yokai repertoire, often played for both horror and dark comedy, as in tales where a servant or traveler unknowingly takes lodging with a rokurokubi and discovers the truth only through a startling nighttime encounter.