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Like yesterday’s page, today’s page is full of absurdities. Kyōden’s hyperbolic metaphors for the depth of love between man and fish are splendid, and feel more like something that was written today than over 200 years ago.

The love between man and carp was deeper than the toilets at Shinagawa-juku¹; deeper than the wells at Kōjimachi²; deeper than an indigo cloth which has been died indigo again. They seriously considered running away in secret and starting a new life together… until one day the carp became pregnant. Urashima Tarō was completely at a loss over whether to keep the child or not; but eventually, Orino gave birth to a baby girl. Because it was the child of a man and a carp, it was born with the body of a fish and the head of a human. In other words, it was a mermaid.

1. Shinawaga-juku was one of the famous 53 stations along the Tōkaidō road that connected Edo to Kyōtō. The toilets at the station were built out over the water and emptied straight into the sea far below.
2. Kōjimachi was an area of high elevation, so the wells had to be dug deep. The phrase “the wells of Kōjimachi” was a figure of speech meaning extremely deep or even bottomless.

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Pages 4 and 5 are depicted below. The illustration shows Urashima Tarō and Orino flirting in an expensive, private, 2nd floor brothel room. Fishing gear, take-out noodles, a tobacco tray and sake decanter are scattered about the room. The brothel madame (an elderly catfish) is coming up the stairs with tea.

Urashima Tarō and Orino spent many hours together. They joked about whether they should commit lovers’ suicide or not, or whether he should cook her or boil her, and so on.

Urashima Tarō: “Do you really love me? You may be a fish, but don’t make a fool out of me.”

Orino: “If you doubt me that much, you can turn me into sashimi¹ and see my true heart. I prayed to Kinkō Sennin² that my love for you would be returned, and I even swore never to eat rakugan³ again. Even if my body were sliced into thin strips of sashimi and eaten with roasted sake, my heart is unchanging, like a fish boiled in miso soup. My heart is like water dammed up behind the Dragon Gate⁴; it wants to leap out like a dragon and fly to be by your side. As such, I feel like I could become a flying dragon. The love that comes from the underwater kingdom is as deep and profound as the bottom of the sea.”

1. The text lays the puns on thick, playing with different types of carp-based dishes and the fact that koi (carp) and koi (romance) are homophones. Most of the jokes get lost in translation, sadly.
2. Kinkō Sennin (Chinese: Qin Gao) was a wizard from ancient Chinese folklore who was able to ride on the back of a carp like it was a horse.
3. Rakugan is a colorful sweet. In this case, she swore it off as a payment for the wish she made.
4. An ancient Chinese myth says that a carp who is able to swim up a waterfall to the Dragon Gate at the top of the Yellow River would transform into a dragon.

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Pages 4 and 5 of Hakoiri musume are presented with a two-page spread illustration, so I am sharing both pages below. Note how once again the fish characters are portrayed as humans with fish sitting on top of their heads. This served multiple purposes—not only was it easier for an artist to portray posts, emotions, and movement by using familiar human forms; it also allowed artists to sneak in caricatures or cameos of famous people and celebrities into their work!

Thus, Nakazu once again became part of the world of the Dragon Palace. It prospered, and was full of beautiful teahouse girls¹, called shigoku², who were so popular that goldfish and silverfish³ flocked to the neighborhood.

This is where that famous playboy Urashima Tarō⁴ liked to visit–I’m sure you all know his story. He was the lover of the princess Otohime, daughter of Dragon King Shakatsura II, Bakatsura Ryūō⁵. Urashima Tarō had grown a bit bored of the beautiful Otohime, and he secretly began visiting brothels in Nakazu. He fell in love with a courtesan named Orino, who belonged to a brothel called Tonegawaya⁶, and was considered exceptionally beautiful even among the shigoku.

1. There’s often confusion over the difference between hanamachi and yūkaku, or geisha and sex workers, or what is a legitimate tea house and what is a “tea house.” But banish that confusion, because in this story, teahouse girls definitely means prostitutes!
2. The real Nakazu was full of inexpensive, unlicensed prostitutes. These women were called jigoku (“hell”) in the local slang. But in the undersea world where everything seems topsy-turvy, Nakazu is full of shigoku (“the best”), who are exceptionally beautiful fish prostitutes.
3. In the neighborhood of Ryōgoku in Edo there were unlicensed, cheap prostitutes who were nicknamed gold cats and silver cats. Because this story takes place under water Kyōden changed cats to fish, and once again flipped what was unpopular on land into something very popular in the undersea world.
4. Urashima Tarō is one of Japanese folklore’s most well-known figures. No reader would have been unfamiliar with his story. You can read about him in countless books and webpages. (One of my favorite jokes in this book is how Kyōden has turned Urashima Tarō from a beloved children’s hero into a gigolo and a bit of a jerk. He’s essentially a kept man, a lover of a princess who is too low of rank to marry her, but he mooches off of his royal connections and runs around like a playboy.)
5. Shakatsura is one of the Dragon Kings in Buddhist scripture. Shakara, Sakara, and Bakara are some of the variations of his name in Japanese, but I just went with how it was written in this book. His Indian/Sanskrit name is Sāgara.
6. Orino’s name means carp, written in the flowery and fashionable style that courtesans used for their business names. The Tone River was famous for its carp, and similarly the Tonegawaya brothel was famous for Orino. She was the most beautiful fish in all of Nakazu.

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Today’s post is page 3 of Hakoiri musume. The illustration on pages 2 and 3 forms a double page spread, so I am including the scan on both page below for refence.

The illustration below has a number of great things to look at. One thing of note is how sea creatures were drawn in the Edo Period. Each of the characters in the illustration below is not a human, but a fish. Note the animals on top of their heads denoting what kind of fish they are. This is not unique to Kyōden; this is how most artists illustrated anthropomorphized fish. In fact you can see this trend all over Japanese art. Next time you look at statuary or illustrations, look carefully above their heads. You may learn that what you think is a person is actually a dragon or some other creature simply being expressed in human form!

In commemoration of its opening, and with permission from the Dragon King, a freak show, a theater, a teahouse, a shooting gallery, etc. were built in the undersea Nakazu Shinchi. It is just as crowded and popular as it was when the human Nakazu Shinchi was built. Sea lion performed acrobatics, flying fish walked on tightropes, clams blew mirages¹, and octopuses played one-man-bands². People crowded around trying to make money with various spectacles. Money is good all the way down to the bottom of the sea.

Fish #1: “Was that a real clam making the mirage, or was it just a trick projection with a candle?”

Fish #2: “Can you really staff a brothel with only blowfish³? I think I’ll go fire off a shot…⁴”

1. In Japanese folklore, mirages at sea are said to be images of the Dragon King’s palace breathed out of the mouths of giant clams. The word for mirage, shinkirō, means “clam breath castle.” The man on the far left is pointing to an image of a clam mirage, and spectators wonder if it’s really a mirage or a trick projection on a screen with a candle.
2. I translated this as “one man band,” but it’s not the same as what we know as a one man band in English. The Japanese term in hachiningei, which means “eight man performance,” referring to one man performing the work of eight. This works well for an octopus with its eight limbs. (The large signs in the foreground advertise the sea lion acrobatics and octopus one-man-band.)
3. This is an exquisitely multi-layered pun. Blowfish must be sliced carefully to avoid the deadly neurotoxin in their meat. The cheapest back-alley brothels in Edo’s red-light districts were tiny rows of dirty rooms called kirimise (“sliced shops”) because of how narrow they were. They sold sex at half the usual price: 100 mon, which coincidentally sounds just like the word for a bullet. A slang term for blowfish is teppō (“gun”), while “firing off a shot” is slang for sex. These extremely cheap brothels were said to be good only for a single “shot;” you’d never go back twice. When this fish says that he wants to fire off a shot, it sounds like he wants to visit the shooting range, but he’s really talking about visiting the cheapest blowfish brothel around. Finally, there is the association of the blowfish’s deadly neurotoxin with diseases like syphilis which one picks up at a cheap brothel. In Japanese, the same verb (ataru) is used to mean contracting a disease from a brothel, as well as eating a piece of poisoned blowfish—and also shooting a target with a gun!
4. On the far right of the illustration there is an archery hut. These were ostensibly places to go fire arrows like a carnival shooting gallery. But they were staffed by sexy, flirty young women, who were as much of an attraction as the archery. It was an open secret that sex was for sale as well. Just look at the elderly fish heading to the archery range—I don’t think he’s going there to shoot arrows.

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As I explained earlier, I will be presenting Hakoiri musume menya ningyo one page at a time. However, some of the illustrations in the book are two-page spreads—like today’s for example. I am still presenting the text one page at a time, but I will share the full spread on both days to avoid disrespecting the illustrations.

Today’s illustration depicts the Dragon King. He is the god of the ocean realm, and rules everything under the water. He lives in a great palace called Ryūgūjō at the bottom of the sea. My illustration is based on statues of the Dragon King and other gods on display at Sanjūsangendō.

“The river never stops flowing, yet the water we see flowing in front of us is not the same water. The bubbles that float on the surface disappear here and reappear there, and do not remain in the same state.” So wrote Kamo no Chōmei in Hōjōki six hundred years¹ ago, yet it is just as true today. Nakazu Shinchi² has returned to its original flow, but the reality is that land becomes water, water becomes land, and so forth, changing over and over faster than a peep show³. Oh no! I didn’t mean to sound so rhetorical!

Anyway, just like that, Nakazu, which belonged to the human world until yesterday, has become submerged and from today is back under control of the Dragon King.

1. Hōjōki is a collection of Buddhist essays written in 1212 CE. Nearly 600 years ago from Kyōden’s perspective in 1791.
2. Nakazu Shinchi was a downtown section of Edo about 1000 square meters in size. It was built in 1771 by land reclamation where the Sumida River met the Hakozaki River. The village of Tominaga was built on this land, and became a prosperous district full of homes, shops, and unlicensed prostitutes. It was demolished and turned back into river land in the first year of Kansei (1789), thus “returning to its original flow.”
3. This refers to mechanical nozoki karakuri peep shows found at sideshows and spectacles which were all the rage at the time. These shows were where you’d see things like petrified mermaids and other yōkai, so this plays right into the mermaid theme of the book.

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Hakoiri musume menya ningyo begins with a single-page foreword by the publisher–or so the author would have us believe. The story itself doesn’t properly begin until page 2, but the foreword is as much a part of the author’s narrative as the story itself, and it’s entertaining as well.

Since page 1 is not part of the story, today’s illustration (above) is just a mermaid courtesan read Hakoiri musume. It has nothing to do with the story other than  being thematically related.

Warmest greetings,

I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to my readers for your continued patronage and support.

The author of this work, Kyōden, has written many books for you to read; but it is utter foolishness to squander time and paper on a joke of a book like this. Last spring in particular, he lost all motivation after being slammed by the public¹, and he told us flatly this year that he would never write again. Our sales, which have relied upon Kyōden’s books, were sure to plummet. I asked him if he could write just one book this year as a favor to me. Kyōden could not refuse his long-time friend, and agreed to write one more piece.

This illustrated novelette is the work that he created. I hope that our readers will see our advertisements and order a copy.

Kansei 3, New Year’s Day²
Publisher Tsutaya Jūzaburō³

1. Kokubyaku mizukagami, a kibyōshi by Ishibe Kinkō, was banned by the government in 1789 because it discussed the 1784 murder of Tanuma Okitomo by Sano Masakoto. Santō Kyōden, who worked on the book as an illustrator, was also fined.

2. This date uses the old Japanese calendar; the Gregorian calendar date equals the spring of 1791.

3. The foreword is signed Tsutaya Jūzaburō, who was the publisher of the book. He was a famous publisher and patron of the arts, and was known as “the man with the big belly” for his magnanimity. He was the publisher who introduced the world to Tōshūsai Sharaku, the famous “phantom” ukiyoe artist. He also introduced the world to Kitao Masanobu, a relatively unknown ukiyoe artist at the time (who happened to actually be a pen name for Santō Kyōden). However, this foreword was actually written by Kyōden as part of the work itself. Kyōden is joking that he was trying to practice self-restraint after receiving a fine for his previous work, but the publisher begged him to write this so he had no choice.

October is here, and you know what that means. A-Yokai-A-Day is upon us!

Every day of the month, in celebration of Halloween, I will be painting and posting yokai-themed work here on my blog. And I’d like to invite all yokai fans to participate along with me, by creating and sharing yokai art on social media using the hashtag #ayokaiaday.

If you enjoy A-Yokai-A-Day, please consider joining my Patreon. Support from patrons is what allows me to work on yokai full time. Without them, there is no way I could complete a project of this size in one month. My goal has always been to share yokai stories freely with the world, and I am so grateful to my patrons for their support in that effort.

This year for A-Yokai-A-Day, rather than sharing 31 unconnected yokai, I want to share with you a single, full story, translating one page per day and posting it along with an illustration and some discussion of the text. This book has 30 pages, which makes it perfect for sharing throughout the month in this manner.

The book I am sharing is called Hakoiri musume menya ningyo. It was published in 1791 by a famous publisher called Tsutaya Jūzaburō. The author is Santō Kyōden, who was famous for his sense of humor in writing. The illustrator is Kitao Masanobu. The first joke is right there, because Kitao Masanobu is actually a pen name for Santō Kyōden. He wrote and illustrated the book under two different names.

This is the story of a mermaid who falls in love with a human and marries him. You could call it the Japanese Little Mermaid, except that this story was published in 1791, nearly 50 years before Hans Christian Andersen published his famous tale. So in fact, maybe the popular fairy tale should actually be called the Danish Hakoiri Musume. And to be honest, I think this one is the better story of the two. It is full of multi-layered puns, it is outrageously silly, and it doesn’t have an awful ending that feels tacked on like Andersen’s story does. More than that, it offers a fascinating window into lives of people living in Edo in 1791.

The genre of this book is called kibyōshi. The word means “yellow cover,” which refers to the yellow paper used for the covers of these books (actually they were originally blue, but over time the dyes faded into yellow and this name stuck). Kibyōshi were the equivalent of dime novels or cheap pulp fiction of the 20th century. They were mass-produced, and written to appeal to a broad audience. They dealt with topics of the day, and in many ways serve as a snapshot or a time capsule of the pop culture from the year they were published. This book, for example, contains references to political events, popular music and theater, trending slang, and even celebrity name drops. When you think of literature of the 1790’s, you might think of Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, or the Marquis de Sade—stuffy authors you were made to read in high school. But this book is so much more humorous and absurd than you’d expect from anything written in 1791.

Let’s talk about the title. Hakoiri musume menya ningyo is a bit of a mouthful, so I’ll break it down a bit. Hakoiri musume means “daughter in a box.” It’s a phrase that refers to girls who are overly sheltered by their parents and grow up knowing nothing of the world, as if they had been raised in a box. Menya is the name of a famous doll shop in Edo at the time period. Ningyo means “mermaid,” but is a homophone with ningyō meaning “doll.” Put it together and you can see that even the title is a pun with multiple meanings. It sounds like the doll shop Menya is selling dolls of girls in boxes. Or it sounds like they are selling mermaids in boxes. Or, it sounds like the story of a young mermaid who knows nothing of the world. Very clever, Kyōden!

The idea of a mermaid in a box carries one more connotation that is a little less obvious. It’s impossible to talk about Japanese mermaids without talking about misemono. Misemono were sideshows that were all the rage during the Edo period. And just like at Ripley’s shows, one of the most common attractions at misemono shows were mummified yōkai. Many of these mummies still survive today, and yokai fans may be familiar with the preserved kudan, tengu, and kappa mummies that I’ve shared on my blog before (here and here). Mermaids were one of the most common of these mummies, and yokai professor Yumoto Kōichi has said that the majority of the world’s mermaid mummies were produced here in Japan. I suppose it was easy enough to sew a monkey to a fish, put it behind a curtain in a dimly lit room, and charge a few coins for a flash glimpse of it. “Mermaid in a box” is a clear reference to these popular Edo period attractions, and misemono side shows are a recurring theme in the story itself.

Now that you know a bit about the background of the book, I need to write some acknowledgments before we dive in. I am able to write these posts thanks to universities and museums which preserved these treasures and making scans of them freely available online. The scan I referenced is part of Waseda University’s Kotenseki Sogo Database, and you can access the book yourself here. The Freer Gallery’s Pulverer Collection also hosts an online scan of a different printing of the book, which you can find here. I’m sure there are other copies available as well. We are so lucky to be living in a time where these books are preserved and made available in this way. Also, because books like these are very difficult to decipher (the script alone is nearly illegible, and the dialect is hard to digest as well—imagine reading handwritten Shakespeare), I referenced Tanahashi Masahiro’s Edo gesaku sōshi, which was invaluable to making sense of this work.

Now, with the introduction out of the way, I can share today’s illustration!

These are the main characters of our story. To the left, the titular mermaid, and to the right, Heiji, an elderly fisherman. Behind them is the title: Hakoiri musume menya ningyo.

Oh, and just so you’re aware, this is not a children’s story. It is funny, dirty, and meant for adults. It takes place in a red light district. It jokes about topics such as sex, sex work, coercion into sex work, the selling of women, child abandonment, human-on-fish bestiality, fish-cunnilingus, and I’m not censoring any of it. If you’re okay with all of that, then let’s get weird!