Hikiko-san: The Crawling Girl of Japan's Rainy Days

In 2008, a Japanese production company called TMC released a horror film built around a figure who was, at that point, little more than a name passed around among schoolchildren. More versions followed over the next several years, the last of them in 2015 — an unusually long run for a story with no known author. The figure at the centre of it is Hikiko-san (ひきこさん), a girl who is said to appear when it rains. Unlike many legends of its kind, Hikiko-san can be traced back to a specific week in 2001, and to two separate posts on a ghost-story website that together produced the character people know today.

Quick facts

• Verdict: Hikiko-san is a modern Japanese internet legend. The first known telling is a story posted to a ghost-story website in July 2001; the name and backstory were added in a separate post two days later. No real person or event has been identified behind it.
• Name: Hikiko-san; within the legend she is given the full name Mori Hikiko.
• Type: Urban legend / schoolyard ghost story about a hostile female figure.
• Earliest known record: 24 July 2001, a post to the website Alpha-web Kowai Hanashi, as identified in a 2021 article by the writer Asazato Itsuki. The original post was not checked directly.
• In print: Collected in Namiki Shin’ichiro’s The Strongest Urban Legends (2007).
• Where it spread: From the website, reportedly onto television in 2003, then into print by 2007 and onto film from 2008 onward.

What the story says

The legend describes a figure in a ragged white kimono, with eyes drawn sharply upward and a mouth that splits open as far as the ears. She is a creature of wet weather: she appears on rainy days, and what she does when she appears is seize children and drag them along with her. That single action — the dragging — is the whole of the encounter as the legend records it, and it is what gives the story its particular quality. There is no riddle to answer, no question to get right or wrong. There is only rain, and being caught.

Attached to this is a backstory. The figure is said to have a real name, Mori Hikiko, and to have been an ordinary girl before she became what the story describes — academically able and kind-natured. Her transformation is explained in two competing ways: either she was bullied by other pupils, or she was abused by her parents. Which of the two is the cause depends on who is telling it. The story also plays on language. The name is linked to wordplay with the Japanese word hikikomori, the term for acute social withdrawal, and that echo is part of why the name stuck.

Earliest known record

The earliest known record is a post made on 24 July 2001 to Alpha-web Kowai Hanashi (“scary stories”), a website that collected ghost stories submitted by readers. The date and the site name come from a two-part article published in 2021 on Gendai media, Kodansha’s online magazine, by Asazato Itsuki, a writer who specialises in modern Japanese apparitions. That makes the online story six years older than Namiki Shin’ichiro’s The Strongest Urban Legends (2007), the print compilation that had been the usual reference point for the legend.

The first post is noticeably simpler than the legend as it is told now. As Asazato summarises it, a boy on a rainy day sees an unusually tall woman on a riverbank under a bridge, dragging something along behind her that he first takes for a doll. The woman does not speak. She has no name, and there is no story of bullying or abuse to explain her. She is simply a frightening stranger in the rain — the core image of the later legend, without any of the character that was later built around it.

One caution applies. The 2001 date rests on Asazato’s secondary analysis. The original posts on Alpha-web Kowai Hanashi were not available to check for this article, and the site’s own archive has not been examined. The date is the best available one, but an earlier telling elsewhere cannot be ruled out.

What is documented

What can be stated with confidence is narrow but real. A legend by this name exists in Japanese circulation and was consolidated in print by 2007 in Namiki’s compilation. Its content, in its settled form, is consistent on the essentials: the ragged white kimono, the distorted face, rainy-day appearances, and children being dragged away. The name Mori Hikiko is part of the legend, as is the twofold explanation of her transformation through bullying or through abuse at home. The link between her name and the word hikikomori is also part of the recorded material rather than a later reader’s guess.

The name and the backstory arrived separately from the first story. According to Asazato, a follow-up post appeared on the same website on 26 July 2001, two days after the first. It gave the woman the name Mori Hikiko and explained how she came to be what she is through both bullying by classmates and the abuse by her parents that followed it. Asazato considers the two posts to be by different people. If that reading is right, Hikiko-san was never written by a single author: an unnamed monster from one contributor was given a name, a past and a motive by another, and the combination is what later tellings repeat.

The legend’s reach is documented indirectly, through its later appearances. Asazato’s article states that Hikiko-san was featured on 5 August 2003 in a ghost-story segment of the TV Asahi-network variety show Sekai Tsukai Densetsu!! Unmei no Dadadadan! Z. That would put the name on national television two years after the posts and five years before the first film. The broadcast itself has not been viewed for this article, and it was a segment introducing a scary story, not a dramatisation of the kind the later films were. After that, a story does not get filmed repeatedly across seven years unless enough people already recognise the name.

What is contested

The broad outline of the origin is now clearer, but the details are not settled. The 2001 date depends on a single secondary account, and the primary posts have not been checked. Nor is it established how the story travelled from a reader-submission website into schools, television and print — whether through retellings in class, through other websites, or through the 2003 broadcast.

The backstory is also internally contested: bullying and parental abuse are given as alternative causes for the same transformation, and no version is authoritative over the other. That kind of split is typical of a story shaped by many retellings rather than written once by an identifiable author.

Nothing in the available sources suggests that a girl named Mori Hikiko existed, that any of the events described happened, or that the legend is attached to a real incident or a real place. The earliest versions are stories posted to a ghost-story website, and the legend should be read as fiction throughout.

One point deserves care. The figure’s appearance is, in the story, the direct consequence of cruelty done to a child, and the name plays on a word used for real people living in withdrawal. Neither the disfigurement nor the wordplay is a comment on real people who look different or who live withdrawn lives; they are devices in a ghost story, and treating them as anything else misreads what the legend is.

What the sources add

The research article and the popular retellings agree on the core image: a woman seen in the rain, dragging something behind her, who then pursues children. That image is present from the very first post, and it has survived every later version. Where they differ is in how much of the rest was there at the start.

The first difference is precision about dates. Without the research, the earliest fixed point is the 2007 book, which records the legend but does not say where it came from. Asazato’s article narrows the origin to a specific site and to two dates two days apart in July 2001. That is a rare level of precision for a modern Japanese legend, although it still rests on one researcher’s reading rather than on an archived original.

The second difference is authorship. In the current telling, the name, the ruined face and the bullying backstory feel like parts of a single designed character. The research suggests they were assembled: the first post supplied the silent figure, and a second post, apparently by someone else, supplied the name and the reason. In the original follow-up post, bullying and abuse at home ran one after the other; later retellings turned them into alternatives.

The third point is what the sources do not add. None of them ties Hikiko-san to a real town, school, river or bridge; the riverbank in the first post is a generic setting. None connects her to a real case. The legend’s links to the outside world run instead through media — a reported television segment in 2003, a book in 2007 and films from 2008. These are the visible steps by which a two-day exchange on a reader-submission website became a nationally known name.

Adaptations

The screen history begins with the TMC-produced version of 2008 — the entry point through which many people outside Japan first encounter the name. It was followed by further filmed works, with productions appearing across the period from 2008 to 2015. That run of adaptations is the most visible trace the legend has left outside word-of-mouth, and it is also why the story is better known in its filmed shape than in the short posts where it began.