The Noppera-bo is an Edo-period creature that looks like an ordinary person until it turns to reveal a smooth face with no features at all. It usually ends not by harming directly but by plunging the witness into extreme terror.
The horror lies not in violence but in the erasure of identity. Where the face — the surest marker of being someone — has been wiped away, it forms the archetype of faceless horror alongside Korea’s Dalgyal-gwisin.