Japanese Buddhist folklore holds more than one class of hungry or corpse-adjacent spirit, and the jikininki is worth distinguishing carefully from the better known gaki, or hungry ghost, a figure this atlas records separately. A gaki's torment is generic and largely unconditioned by any one specific fault: an insatiable hunger and a body unable to satisfy it, understood broadly as one of the standard six realms of rebirth in Buddhist cosmology, open to a wide range of unwholesome conduct in a prior life. The jikininki's punishment is narrower and more pointed, reserved specifically for greed and a hoarding, ungenerous character, and its particular form, devouring human corpses rather than suffering ordinary hunger, is read within the tradition as fitting the fault directly: a person who withheld generosity from the living is condemned to a degrading, secret feeding on the dead.
That specificity is part of a wider pattern in Buddhist karmic storytelling, where the shape of a punishment is meant to comment on the shape of the sin that earned it rather than functioning as an undifferentiated hell-realm assignment. The jikininki accordingly appears in Japanese sources less often as a monster to be fought or exorcised and more often as a figure to be pitied and, where possible, released through proper ritual, since its suffering is understood as a temporary karmic consequence working itself out rather than as a fixed evil nature. That is precisely the resolution Hearn's priest offers the creature he meets: not banishment, but the rite its former life as a priest should itself have performed.