The is a monster from Toriyama Sekien

Toriyama Sekien

thumb|200px| was an 18th century scholar and ukiyo-e artist of Japanese folklore. He was the teacher of Utamaro and, before taking up printmaking, a painter of the Kanō school. Toriyama is most famous for his attempt to catalogue all species of yōkai in the Hyakki Yakō series.-References:...

's Gazu Hyakki Yakō, likely based on a creature called aka-neburi from the , an Edo period

Edo period

The , or , is a division of Japanese history which was ruled by the shoguns of the Tokugawa family, running from 1603 to 1868. The political entity of this period was the Tokugawa shogunate....

 story collection.
Sekien included no explanation with the drawing, but today the akaname is often described as a being which appears in untidy bathrooms to lick up the grime and dirt with poisonous saliva. The story is sometimes used to scare children into keeping the bathroom clean. This explanation seems to have originated in a 1920s anthology of yōkai

Yōkai

are a class of supernatural monsters in Japanese folklore. The word yōkai is made up of the kanji for "otherworldly" and "weird". Yōkai range eclectically from the malevolent to the mischievous, or occasionally bring good fortune to those who encounter them...

art.