Lafcadio Hearn's retelling in Kwaidan, itself drawn from an older Japanese Buddhist source, gives the jikininki its best known English-language account and lays out the creature's logic plainly. A traveling priest, staying overnight in a remote mountain village, learns that the local headman has just died and that the villagers, for reasons they refuse to explain, have all left the house and gone elsewhere for the night rather than sit with the body as custom would normally require. The priest, unwilling to leave a corpse unattended, stays behind alone to perform the proper rites, and in the night a creature enters, devours the body and the offerings left beside it, and then, unexpectedly, speaks to the priest, explaining what it is and asking for the rite that might finally release it.
The creature identifies itself as the karmic fate of a priest who, in an earlier life in that same village, cared only for money and material payment for his religious services rather than for the people he was meant to serve; his greed condemned him, on death, to be reborn as a jikininki, forced to feed on the very corpses a properly devoted priest would instead have honored with sincere rites. The tale's force comes from the doubling it sets up between the two priests, the living one performing the rite correctly out of genuine duty and the transformed one who failed at exactly that duty in his prior life, a contrast Hearn's account and the older Buddhist telling behind it use to make the jikininki's punishment specifically fit its cause rather than functioning as a generic monster encounter.