Biwa-bokuboku

Also Known As: 琵琶牧々, also written 琵琶牧牧; the second element puns on Bokuba 牧馬, the name of a celebrated court lute
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: A lute that has taken a human body and the dress of a blind lute-priest, standing upright on its own legs with a staff in hand.
Role in Mythos: It is the picture Toriyama Sekien drew in 1784 to give a face to the strange behaviour long attributed to the court’s named biwa.
Relation to Humans: Nothing is recorded of it meeting anyone, harming anyone, or being seen outside the page it was drawn on. The lutes that lie behind it, by contrast, dealt with people constantly, and were said to sulk, refuse to sound, and once to walk out of a burning palace unassisted.

Late in a small Edo picture book, a blind priest leans on a staff with his head tipped forward, and where his face should be there is a lute. The tuning pegs sit where the crown of the skull would go. Four strings run down the length of what ought to be a forehead and a nose. The eyes, painted onto the pale wood of the belly, are shut.

The book is Toriyama Sekien’s *Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro*, published in 1784, the last of four illustrated yōkai catalogues he brought out between 1776 and 1784. Its title is already a joke. It borrows the sound of Kenkō’s *Tsurezuregusa* and swaps the character for demon out for the one meaning vessel or implement, so that what the reader is handed is a bag of a hundred tools rather than a hundred devils. Almost everything inside used to be an object.

Beside the picture Sekien wrote a single line of explanation. The lutes called Genjō and Bokuba, he says, were famous instruments of old, and marvels attended them again and again; so this is a turn on that Bokuba’s biwa, and is that why it is called Bokuboku. That is the entire textual record of the creature. He is not reporting something a villager saw. He is looking at two celebrated court instruments with a great deal of strangeness attached to them, hearing a pun in one of the names, and drawing what the pun would look like if it stood up and put on robes.

The lutes were real, and famous, and old. The *Kinpishō*, a manual of court practice compiled by the retired Emperor Juntoku in 1221, names Genjō and Bokuba among the palace’s great biwa. Genjō, written two ways and pronounced the same, drew stories the way a cathedral draws pigeons. The best of them sits in the *Konjaku monogatarishū*, in the twenty-fourth volume, and it is told plainly.

In the reign of Emperor Murakami, the tale runs, Genjō went missing from the palace. It had come down through the imperial house for generations and could not simply be carried off, so the theory at court was that somebody had stolen it out of spite and smashed it. Then one night the courtier Minamoto no Hiromasa, on duty in the Seiryōden after everyone had gone to sleep, heard it playing, far off to the south. He knew the sound too well to mistake it. He told nobody. He pulled on a plain robe and one pair of shoes, took a single page boy, went out past the guardhouse and started walking. The sound stayed ahead of him. It was still ahead at the Suzakumon; still ahead down the length of Suzaku Ōji; still ahead when the road ran out at the Rashōmon, the great gate at the southern edge of the city, where the paving stopped and the world outside the capital began. He stood beneath it and listened to Genjō being played on the storey above him. No man plays like that, he thought. This will be an oni.

Then he called up and asked who was playing, and said that the emperor had been searching. The music stopped. Something moved in the dark above, and Hiromasa stepped back from whatever was coming down, and what came down was the lute on the end of a rope. He carried it home. The emperor said, so an oni took it, and that was that.

The storyteller adds a coda that matters more than the theft. Genjō, he says, is as good as alive. Play it badly and it takes offence and will not sound. Let dust settle on it and fail to wipe it and it takes offence and will not sound. Its moods are perfectly legible. And once, when the palace burned, nobody carried Genjō out, because Genjō had already gone out into the garden by itself.

Bokuba kept less dramatic company but was not left alone either. Kenkō’s *Tsurezuregusa*, written around 1330, has a scene at the Seishodō in the Genō era, at a time when Genjō had been stolen and was still missing. The minister known as Kikutei, Fujiwara no Kanesue, sat down to play Bokuba in its place, felt along the neck to tune by touch, and knocked a fret clean off. He happened to be carrying a lump of boiled-rice paste inside his robe, which tells you something about the life of a court musician, and he stuck the fret back on. By the time the offerings were laid out it had dried and the performance went off without trouble. Afterwards a woman in a hooded travelling cloak came out of the watching crowd, pulled the fret off again, and set it down exactly where it had been. Kenkō wonders what grudge she was working off and then declines to say.

That is the material Sekien was working from, and the tradition he slotted it into was already centuries old. The Muromachi tale *Tsukumogami ki* explains that after nearly a hundred years of service, containers and tools and instruments acquire souls of their own. In its telling the objects are thrown out during the year-end sweeping of soot, take offence at being discarded, transform themselves on the eve of the lunar new year with the help of a creation god, and set about eating people and animals and holding drinking parties, until Buddhist ritual subdues them and they repent and go into the priesthood. The name is usually written with characters meaning ninety-nine hairs, from an old poem in the *Ise monogatari* about a woman a single year short of a hundred, and the arithmetic is the joke: not old enough to be venerable, just old enough to be uncanny. By Sekien’s century the mood had softened. The tool spirits of Edo comic books are as often small helpers as avengers.

He also had a picture to copy. Muromachi handscrolls of the night parade of a hundred demons include a lute spirit hauling a koto spirit along behind it, and the folklorist Murakami Kenji identifies that pair as the model for Sekien’s plate. It is a fair identification: Biwa-bokuboku shares its two-page spread with Koto-furunushi, the koto given the same treatment.

Here is the plain part. Sekien gave the thing a name, a face and a costume, and no story whatsoever. No source describes it walking, playing, speaking, or being encountered. Its powers are the powers of its class, and the class is well documented: animation, grievance, mobility, an appetite that arrives with the grievance. Its weaknesses are the same borrowed ones, since the *Tsukumogami ki* spirits are broken by a written charm and by guardian boys sent down from a ritual, and then finished off, in the friendliest possible way, by conversion. None of this is attested of the lute. What is genuinely its own is smaller and stranger: a blind instrument, standing where a blind musician should be, holding a staff it has no eyes to need. The generation after Sekien seems to have liked it. Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s 1865 print of a night parade includes a figure that looks very much as though it was drawn with Sekien’s page open on the desk.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Biwa-bokuboku?

Biwa-bokuboku is a Japanese tsukumogami, a lute that has taken on a human body. It appears in Toriyama Sekien’s illustrated yōkai book *Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro* of 1784, drawn as a blind priest with a four-stringed biwa in place of a head.

Where does the name Biwa-bokuboku come from?

The name is a pun. Sekien’s own caption says it derives from Bokuba, one of two famous court lutes, the other being Genjō, and asks whether that is why the creature should be called Bokuboku. Both instruments are named in the *Kinpishō*, a court manual completed in 1221.

Is Biwa-bokuboku an ancient Japanese legend?

No. The named creature is Sekien’s invention of 1784, and no earlier source records a being called Biwa-bokuboku. What is old is the material behind it: the marvels attached to the lutes Genjō and Bokuba, and the medieval belief that tools acquire souls after roughly a hundred years of use.

What did the lute Genjō actually do?

According to the *Konjaku monogatarishū*, Genjō vanished from the palace in the reign of Emperor Murakami and was found being played by an unseen presence in the upper storey of the Rashōmon gate, which lowered it back down on a rope to the courtier Minamoto no Hiromasa. The same account says Genjō refused to sound for clumsy players or when left dusty, and once left a burning palace under its own power.

What is a tsukumogami?

A tsukumogami is a household object that has gained a soul after long service, conventionally close to a hundred years. The Muromachi-period *Tsukumogami ki* describes discarded tools turning vengeful, attacking people, and eventually being subdued and converted to Buddhism.