寝肥
ねぶとり

Translation: sleep fattening
Diet: insatiable

Appearance: Nebutori is a supernatural illness that affects women who sleep too soon after meals.

Behavior: Women who eat and sleep right afterwards massively expand during the night. Their appetites grow, causing them to eat more and more, and consequently expand more and more. Eventually they become too big to even leave their rooms. In addition, they snore with enough force to shake a wagon on the street.

Women with nebutori lose their sex appeal and develop loud, domineering personalities. If a home has ten futons, a woman with nebutori will take up seven of them and leave only three for her husband.

Origin: Nebutori was a warning to women to maintain thin figures, gentle personalities, and to avoid oversleeping. It satirizes the stereotype of women who let themselves go once they capture a husband. A common Japanese superstition is that lying down after eating will turn you into a cow; nebutori is a twist on that concept.

Nebutori is similar to other yōkai curses which mainly afflict women. It is described as more of a problem for the husband than for the wife, just as futakuchi onna is a punishment inflicted on miserly old men who are stingy with food, and rokuro kubi affects the daughters or wives of men who have committed terrible crimes. Even though these curses afflict women, they are presented as punishments for their husbands.

Nebutori is sometimes blamed on tanuki or kitsune. Both animals can possess humans and cause them to do strange things. Tanuki in particular like to give their victims huge appetites.