Summer Time Rendering and the Shoryo-uma: The Cucumber Horse That Carries the Dead Home

Everyone in Japan knows the cucumber horse. A cucumber with four legs of split chopstick, an aubergine beside it as an ox, set out for the ancestors during Obon: fast horse to come home on, slow ox to leave by.

That is the version in every primary school worksheet, and it is the version that reaches overseas viewers of Summer Time Rendering — Tanaka Yasuki's series about a young man returning to an island for a funeral during the Obon period. What the folklore records actually show is a good deal stranger, and considerably less uniform.

Spoiler-Free Cultural Analysis

This article covers the documented regional variation in shōryō-uma, the Obon spirit mounts, and the framing Summer Time Rendering shares with it. No plot revelations.

Key Takeaways

• The standard account — cucumber horse, aubergine ox — is one regional version among several. Records from Shōnai in Yamagata describe households that make two cucumber horses instead of a horse and an ox.
• The noodles laid across the animal's back are not decoration. Depending on the region they are a carrying rope, a rein, a sash, or a saddle, and each name implies a different idea of what the ancestor is doing on the way back.
• The dates are not fixed either. Some Shōnai households hang straw spirit horses from the eaves on the sixth or seventh of the month, well before the thirteenth on which the vegetable ones are usually made.

Key Terms Explained

精霊馬 (Shōryō-uma) / Spirit Mount — the animal made for the ancestors to travel on, most often from cucumber and aubergine, but by no means only.

荷縄 (Ninawa) / Carrying Rope — one of several names for the noodle laid across the animal's back, understood as the cord by which the returning spirit carries goods home.

苧殻 (Ogara) / Hemp Stalk — the stripped hemp stem used for the legs in much of the Kantō region, alongside split chopsticks and, in one Ibaraki record, stems of loosestrife.

精霊棚 (Shōryō-dana) / Spirit Shelf — the altar shelf on which the mount is displayed, called shōrei-dana in the Shōnai dialect.

The Version I Was Taught, and the Version in the Records

I grew up with the simple account and never questioned it. Cucumber for speed, aubergine for slowness, both explained in a sentence, both understood by the age of six.

Living outside Japan, I found I was passing that same sentence on to people who asked, in exactly the compressed form I had received it. It is a good sentence. It is also, I discovered when I went looking, a summary of something far less tidy.

The Japanese library reference network — a public database in which libraries publish the answers to questions they have researched — contains a set of enquiries about shōryō-uma, and the responses cite folklore surveys down to the level of individual hamlets. Reading them was like watching a single image resolve into a dozen different ones.

I am not going to claim this changed my practice of anything. I do not build spirit mounts here. What it changed was my willingness to say "in Japan we do X" about a country of considerable internal variation.

What the Surveys Actually Record

The animals are not always a pair

A Yamagata Prefectural Library response, citing a Cultural Affairs Agency record of intangible folk cultural properties, describes the practice in the Shōnai region: the shōryō-uma displayed on the spirit shelf are made from cucumber and aubergine, but households variously describe making a horse from the cucumber and an ox from the aubergine, or making two horses, both from cucumbers.

The same record gives the familiar explanation — a fast horse so that the spirits come quickly, a slow ox so that they depart at an unhurried pace — as something people "explain" rather than as a fixed doctrine.

A survey of Hinohara village in the western hills of Tokyo records the mount being made from cucumber and daikon radish, with sōmen noodles laid on it. The same entry gives the local Obon as falling from the thirteenth to the sixteenth of the fifth month.

The noodle has a job

The strand of udon or sōmen across the animal's back appears constantly in the records, and it is never described as ornament.

A survey of Gunma describes a horse made from cucumber or aubergine with legs of hemp stalk, given diced aubergine as feed, with two strands of udon hung on it as a ninawa — a carrying rope for the goods the spirit takes back — before being set out at the corner of the property.

In Ibaraki, udon and sōmen offered on the morning of the sixteenth, when the ancestors are said to return, are described as the reins of the ox and horse. A separate Ibaraki record from Namegata describes a mount made from aubergine or melon with legs of loosestrife stems, offerings loaded on its back, and sōmen serving as the rein by which the spirit leads it home.

In Saitama, udon is cut into a broad band about twenty centimetres wide and hung on the front cord of the spirit shelf, called the shoi-nawa, the carrying strap.

In a Nagano record from Minami-Azumi, three strands of udon are laid across the back of an aubergine horse whose legs are four split chopsticks and whose tail is sometimes made from corn silk. The same survey describes the returning deity riding a cucumber or aubergine horse fitted with a nikake — a broad flat udon — in place of a saddle.

In northern Ibaraki, udon is hung on the memorial tablet itself, understood as the sash across which the ancestor carries gifts home.

A Japanese noodle dictionary records the term ninawa-soba for this practice: noodles made during Obon, usually on the fifteenth, hung on the shelf's decorative cord or across the back of an aubergine or cucumber horse, on the grounds that the departing spirit needs something to tie the food to.

Carrying rope, rein, strap, sash, saddle. The same strand of noodle, five different accounts of what the ancestor is doing with it.

The dates move

The Shōnai record is the most striking on this point. The usual pattern is to make the mount on the thirteenth, display it on the shelf, and send it off on the sixteenth by floating it on a river or the sea.

But the same survey records households that hang a straw spirit horse from the eaves on the evening of the sixth, saying it goes to fetch the spirits. Others make three straw horses on the seventh and hang them inside a board enclosure in the garden. Others hang two straw horses at the doorway on the seventh and float them down the river on the morning of the thirteenth.

Straw, not vegetable. Six days early, not on the day. Sent to fetch, rather than waiting to be ridden.

What Summer Time Rendering Is Doing With the Same Frame

Summer Time Rendering, serialised by Tanaka Yasuki and adapted into anime in 2022, opens with Shinpei returning to the island where he grew up, for a funeral, during the Obon period. The island is fictional but modelled on a real one off the coast of Wakayama.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to over-read. The series is not about shōryō-uma, and I am not going to claim it is.

What it shares with the practice is a structure. Obon is the period in which the dead come home, and the folklore is entirely practical about the logistics: they need transport, they need something to tie their luggage to, and someone has to go and fetch them. Summer Time Rendering takes a young man who has left, brings him back to the island in exactly that window, and builds its story out of what returns with him.

The island setting matters for the same reason the folklore is so varied. Practices survive in their local forms where communities are small and separate. The Shōnai households making two cucumber horses instead of a horse and an ox are doing what their neighbours do, and their neighbours a valley over are doing something else. An island in a series about a homecoming is drawing on that same fact about Japan — that "home" is a specific place with specific customs, not a general category.

What Is Being Lost, Stated Carefully

There is a detail in the Yamagata record that says more about change than any lament could.

Alongside the spirit horse, the region has a shōryō-sha — a spirit vehicle. According to a 2017 newspaper report cited in the library's response, it originated around the Shōwa 40s, when the wild rice used to make the traditional straw mounts became scarce. With the ancestors' transport unavailable, households began hanging up toy cars instead.

I find that a remarkable piece of continuity rather than a decline. The material vanished; the obligation did not. Somebody looked at the empty eaves, decided the ancestors still needed a way home, and reached for what was to hand.

It also suggests something about what the practice was always for. If the point had been the cucumber, a shortage of wild rice would have ended it. The point was the transport, and transport is a thing you can improvise.

I would rather report that than write the usual sentence about tradition fading. The records show variation, substitution and local invention across every element — the animal, the legs, the noodle, the date, the material. A practice that flexible was never going to be killed by a supply problem.

FAQ

Q: Is the cucumber-horse-aubergine-ox explanation wrong? A: It is one documented version, and a common one, but the surveys record households describing two cucumber horses instead, and mounts made from cucumber and daikon, and straw horses made a week early. The explanation about speed is recorded as something people say, not as a fixed rule. Treat it as the most widespread account rather than the definitive one.

Q: Why noodles? A: The records give several answers depending on the region — a carrying rope for goods, a rein for leading the animal, a sash for the ancestor's shoulder, a flat band standing in for a saddle. What they agree on is that it is functional rather than decorative. The underlying idea is that a spirit going home is carrying things and needs something to secure them with.

Q: Does Summer Time Rendering feature shōryō-uma? A: I am not making that claim, and this article is not built on it. What the series shares with the practice is its frame: a return to a specific island home during the Obon period, when the dead are said to come back. The folklore and the fiction are drawing on the same idea about that week, not on each other.

Key Insights to Remember

• "In Japan we do X" is almost always a summary of several different things. One database query about a single Obon offering produced records of hemp-stalk legs in Gunma, loosestrife-stem legs in Ibaraki, split-chopstick legs and corn-silk tails in Nagano, and straw horses hung a week early in Yamagata. The tidy national version is a real thing, but it is a compression.

• The noodle is the detail worth remembering. Ninawa, tazuna, shoi-nawa, tasuki, nikake — carrying rope, rein, carrying strap, sash, saddle. Each name encodes a slightly different picture of what the returning ancestor is doing, and all of them treat the journey as a practical problem with practical requirements.

• When the material ran out, the practice found another one. Wild rice became scarce in the Shōwa 40s and Shōnai households hung toy cars from the eaves instead. That is not a tradition decaying; it is a tradition demonstrating what it was actually about. The obligation was to provide transport, and the form the transport took was always negotiable.

Sources

• 遊佐町のお盆の精霊馬について — レファレンス協同データベース（山形県立図書館、2025年8月5日作成。庄内地方の精霊馬、藁の精霊馬、精霊車）
• お盆の馬や牛の背中のうどんについて — レファレンス協同データベース（練馬区立練馬図書館、2021年11月16日作成。群馬・茨城・埼玉・東京・長野の記録）
• 仏壇の盆飾りについて — レファレンス協同データベース（埼玉県立久喜図書館。そうめん・うどんの意味）
• 精霊馬 — コトバンク（辞典項目）