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.

Greetings yokai fans!

Today’s yokai is another companion piece.

This is fuguruma yohi, the strange queen of the book cart.

You can probably guess who her companion is, as they are king and queen. Last month’s chirizuka kaio and today’s fuguruma yohi appear opposite each other in their original publication, Hyakki tsurezure bukuro. Like the strange king, this strange queen was made up by Toriyama Sekien, based on a pun from the Tsurezure gusa.

It’s never specified just what she is queen of (if anything). Presumably, she is just the queen of that book cart and it’s just a fancy name. But maybe she is queen of the tsukumogami entirely, ruling alongside the chirizuka kaio? It’s fun to speculate, but really there’s no answer, as neither of them are folkloric or mythological figures. They were both invented for Sekien’s book and really just mainly as silly puns that sharp-eyed and educated readers would enjoy on a level above just the funny illustration. Toriyama Sekien was a master at creating multi-leveled humor.

But regardless of what she is queen of, she’s a fun character to look at and a good addition to our collection of yokai!

http://yokai.com/fugurumayouhi/

文車妖妃
ふぐるまようひ

TRANSLATION: strange queen of the book cart
ALTERNATE NAMES: bunshō no kai (essay spirit)
HABITAT: libraries, temples, and noble houses; anywhere with book collections
DIET: none; she is fueled by emotion

APPEARANCE: Fuguruma yōhi is a spirit which resembles and ogreish human woman in tattered clothing. She is a kind of tsukumogami—an artifact spirit—which manifests out of old-fashioned book carts called fuguruma. In particular, it is the emotion and attachment built up in the piles of love letters stored in these carts which gives birth to this yōkai.

ORIGIN: Fuguruma yōhi appears alongside chirizuka kaiō in Toriyama Sekien’s collection of tsukumogami Hyakki tsurezure bukuro. Like chirizuka kaiō, her name is a pun based on essay 72 from the medieval essay collection Tsurezure gusa. The essay discusses the folly of overabundance. Having too many possessions is a bad thing which distracts you from that which is important; however there is no such thing as having too many books on your book cart. The fuguruma yōhi is what Toriyama Sekien imagined might appear if you actually did have too many books on  your book cart. The desire and attachment written in each single love letter may not amount to very much, but if there are enough letters, enough attachments may pile up that a yōkai can be born from them.