Greetings yokai fans!
It’s been a bit quiet since the last posting… This illustration and these yokai were quite an ordeal! I’m happy with the results of the final image, but boy did I wrestle with these two and the accursed background for a long time!
Worse than the painting, though, was researching. As I mentioned before, there is literally no information on them at all, anywhere. They were invented as images only, and have appeared on the earliest known yokai scrolls as well as many copies in the following centuries.
I took that more as a challenge than a fact, and I searched and searched and searched and searched. I was really hoping to find something interesting, some obscure tale, or anything in older folklore… but ultimately I was only able to confirm that there is no reliable description or folklore related to these two characters. There are some apocryphal stories in English-language books, but they appear to have just been made up by the authors.
I did manage to get their names, which were also invented more recently, of course, but I have a more reliable source for those. They were “named” by a present day yokai researcher who is a member of one of the largest yokai societies in Japan. He put out a book in the early 2000’s and added names to a bunch of these bizarre yokai from the early scrolls, and I figure his naming scheme is good enough for me. You probably won’t find them named Hasamidachi and Furuogi anywhere else, other than in reference to the same book by Aramata Hiroshi, but they are better names than just “fan monster” and “scissors monster.”
Anyway, here they are:
Hasamidachi http://yokai.com/hasamidachi/
鋏裁
はさみだち
TRANSLATION: scissors cutter
APPEARANCE: Hasamidachi is a small yōkai with wild hair, buggy eyes, and a pair of scissors sprouting from its head.
ORIGIN: Hasamidachi appears in the earliest yokai scrolls, and has been copied many times from these early depictions, appearing over and over again in many different scrolls. Despite this, no name or description has ever been recorded. The name hasamidachi was given to it in recent years by yokai researcher Aramata Hiroshi, however it is also known by less descriptive names such as hasami no bakemono (scissors monster) or just hasami (scissors).
Furuogi http://yokai.com/furuougi/
古扇
ふるおうぎ
TRANSLATION: old folding fan
APPEARANCE: Furuōgi is a squat, hairy yōkai with an old, worn out folding fan sprouting from its back.
ORIGIN: Furuōgi appears in some of the earliest Hyakki yagyō emaki, pictures scrolls of the night parade of one hundred demons, along with a number of other tsukumogami. Early yokai scrolls did not give names or descriptions, so nothing about furuōgi is known other than its appearance. Even its name was added much later.