Tsukumogami

What is a tsukumogami?

A tsukumogami is a household object that has come alive. Brooms, sandals, lutes, rice pots, mirrors, rosaries and writing boxes can all qualify. The standard modern dictionary definition is a spirit said to lodge in an implement that has passed a hundred years, after which it can change shape and cause people harm. The idea is old, but its classic statement comes from a single Muromachi-period illustrated scroll, the Tsukumogami-ki or Tsukumogami emaki. That scroll gave the creatures their name, their written form 付喪神, and their famous rule of a hundred years.

Unlike foxes or cats, a tsukumogami is not an animal that learns to shape-shift. It is a thing that was made, used and thrown away, and its power to frighten comes from that history. In the oldest story, the tools turn into monsters because people discarded them without thanks.

The Tsukumogami scroll

Kyoto University Library holds a two-scroll colour copy of the tale, which it describes as a Muromachi-period work. Its own copy is an Edo-period transcription, and its colophon repeats an earlier note dated to the sixth year of Kanbun (1666). The library has put the whole scroll online, with a plain modern-language retelling.

The text opens by citing a book called the Onmyō zakki: an implement that has passed a hundred years acquires a spirit and leads people's hearts astray, and this is called a tsukumogami. That is why, the scroll explains, households carry out the year-end soot-sweeping (susuharai) and throw their old tools into the lanes. They are trying to escape the trouble a tsukumogami would bring.

The story is set in the Kōhō era of the 960s. After one year's cleaning, the discarded tools of the capital gather and complain that they served their households faithfully for years and were rewarded by being kicked into the road by oxen and horses. They resolve to become monsters and take revenge. A rosary, the monk Ichiren, urges them to repay injury with kindness and is beaten for his trouble. A learned old document, Master Kobumi, then proposes a plan based on yin-yang theory. On the night of setsubun, when yin and yang change places, the tools will give up their lives and let the god of creation remake them.

On that night they become monsters of every kind: men and women, old people and children, demons and beasts. They settle behind Mount Funaoka, north of the city, raid the capital, and eat people and cattle. They feast, write poetry, and found a shrine to their own god, whom they call Henge Daimyōjin. On the fifth day of the fourth month they parade their portable shrine east along Ichijō Avenue at night. There they run into the regent's procession. Flames burst from an amulet he wears, a copy of the Sonshō darani spell, and the monsters flee.

The emperor orders rites at court. On the sixth day, sword-bearing guardian boys (gohō dōji) appear in a halo of light and fly north to subdue the monsters. Chastened, the tools seek out the rosary monk they once beat, beg his forgiveness, and become his disciples. Each eventually attains Buddhahood. The library's commentary notes the scroll's purpose: it uses the enlightenment of non-sentient things to argue for the superiority of Shingon esoteric Buddhism. If old tools can become buddhas, the closing lines ask, why not people?

Why a hundred years?

The number 99 can be read tsukumo in Japanese, and the word carries a literary echo. It recalls a poem in episode 63 of the tenth-century Tales of Ise: "one year short of a hundred years, her tsukumo hair", a poetic image of an old woman's white hair. The Edo antiquarian Tō Teikan's essay Kōko shōroku drew the same connection. He quoted the Onmyō zakki passage, explained the soot-sweeping as a way of avoiding tsukumogami that were "a year short of a hundred", and pointed to the same line of verse.

So the hundred years should not be read as an exact rule. It stands for great age. The Kyoto retelling makes the same point in passing: when the tools transform, it remarks that they had already lived more than a hundred years, so the change came at once.

Object monsters before and after

Tools with faces were painted well beyond this one scroll. The most famous example is the Hyakki yagyō emaki (Night Parade of a Hundred Demons) held by Shinju-an, a sub-temple of Daitokuji in Kyoto. It is a sixteenth-century Muromachi scroll and an Important Cultural Property. It has no text, and alongside its blue and red demons march monsters made from implements such as a bow and a kettle stand. The Nipponica encyclopedia suggests it shows the kind of procession that the Tsukumogami tale describes.

In the Edo period the theme passed to print. The painter Toriyama Sekien's series of yokai picture books ended with Hyakki tsurezure-bukuro (1784). The National Diet Library notes that it is filled with everyday implements turned into yokai, among them a biwa lute, a koto and a cooking pot. It also notes that Sekien's designs show the influence of the earlier picture scrolls.

The idea also survived in oral tradition. A 1933 report from the Morioka area of Iwate tells of a beggar sleeping in the garden of an old temple who heard a drinking party in the kitchen. When he peeped in, he saw geta, straw sandals, rice bowls and other junk dancing. They all fled when the first cock crowed. In the same year the custom historian Ema Tsutomu listed the objects most often said to transform: wooden statues, guardian figures, masks and Jizō images, along with puppet-theatre dolls, brooms, fans and flutes.

Respect for old things

Tsukumogami are often explained today as a lesson in caring for possessions. The oldest text supports a version of this: the tools turn monstrous because they were discarded without gratitude. But the Tsukumogami-ki is a Buddhist sermon built on yin-yang theory, not a statement of a general belief that every object has a spirit.

Japan does have rites for objects that have served their owners. In the needle memorial (hari-kuyō), held on 8 February or 8 December, women rest from sewing and push old and broken needles into tofu or konnyaku, then take them to a shrine or temple or float them down a river. At Hōkyōji in Kyoto, known as the "doll temple", unwanted dolls are gathered for a memorial service on 10 October. These rites have their own histories and are not described as tsukumogami rituals in the sources. Still, they share the same instinct: that an object long used deserves a proper farewell.