Of all the strange yokai in Japan's vast supernatural bestiary, the Jinmenju — literally 'human-face tree' — is among the gentlest and the strangest. It is a tree, large and ordinary in shape, that bears fruit shaped like tiny human faces. The faces smile. The faces laugh. The faces giggle to one another from across the branches.
The Jinmenju is recorded most famously in the Japanese encyclopaedia Wakan Sansai Zue of 1712, which described it as growing in the mountains of southern China and remote Japan. The fruits, it explained, are sour but edible, and behave like cheerful little babies hanging from the boughs. They never speak. They only laugh — quietly and constantly.
The catch is in the laughter itself. If a fruit laughs too hard at your joke or your stumble, it will fall from the branch — losing its grip the way a person doubled over in laughter loses their footing. Travellers and woodcutters who came across a Jinmenju were said to deliberately tell jokes beneath it, knock the loose fruit down with humour rather than a stick, and carry the giggling faces home in a basket.
It is a soft, surreal yokai with no malice. It does not hunt. It does not curse. It just sits in the misty hills of the old Japanese imagination, laughing at whoever passes — and reminding us that not every monster wants to hurt you. Some just want to be amused.
Wear the Jinmenju and you wear one of the kindest weird stories Japan ever told about its forests.