Te-no-me

Also Known As: 手の目, “hand eyes”; also romanised Tenome; the same figure is labelled Temebōzu, 手目坊主, in the Tenpō-era Hyakki Yagyō scroll held by the Matsui Bunko in Yatsushiro, Kumamoto
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It has no eyes in its face and sees instead through an eye set in the palm of the hand.
Role in Mythos: It is a night terror of graveyards and empty fields, named and drawn by Toriyama Sekien in 1776 and generally traced to a 1677 Kyoto tale of a monster that drew the bones out of a living man.
Relation to Humans: In the oldest account it hunts a man who went to a burial ground on a wager and leaves nothing of him but his skin. A folktale from Iwate makes it the grudge of a blind man robbed and murdered on the road, still searching for the faces of the men who killed him.

A full moon hangs over a field of susuki grass, and in the middle of the field stands a blind man with his hands up. He wears the shaven head and plain robe of a zatō. There are no eyes in his face. There is one in each of his raised palms, and both of them are open.

Toriyama Sekien printed that picture in Gazu Hyakki Yagyō in 1776 and put a name beside it: 手の目, te-no-me, hand eyes. He added nothing else. The first volume of his bestiary carries names and pictures and no explanations, so the man who named the creature left no word about what it does, where it comes from, or why anyone should be afraid of it. What can be said has to be gathered from what came before the woodblock and from what grew up after it.

What came before is a story printed ninety-nine years earlier in Shokoku Hyakumonogatari, a Kyoto collection of ghost tales from 1677. Its title is as plain as a coroner’s note: the matter of the man whose bones were drawn out by a monster. The burial ground at Shichijō-gawara, on the riverbed at Kyoto’s Seventh Avenue, was said to be haunted, and a group of young men made a wager of it. One of them would go there at midnight, drive a stake into the ground as proof, and come back. Something met him among the graves. It was an old man of about eighty, white hair on his head, eight shaku tall, his face pallid and wasted like an evening-glory flower. His eye was in the palm of his hand. Two front teeth jutted from his mouth. He came straight for the young man.

The young man ran for the nearest temple and begged the monk to hide him. The monk opened a nagamochi, one of the long lidded chests households kept their clothes in, and shut him inside. The monster came into the temple after him, stood there staring about for a long time, and seemed to go. Then, from beside the chest, came a sound like a dog gnawing on a bone, and a groaning voice. The monk stayed crouched where he was, too frightened to move. When at last he decided the thing must have gone and lifted the lid, the man inside had had his bones drawn out of him. Only the skin was left.

The ground itself had a history. Takada Mamoru, annotating the tale for Iwanami in 1989, notes that the Shichijō riverbed had been a place where the dead were abandoned in antiquity, and later served as a commoners’ cemetery kept by monks of the Ji sect. It was not a place anyone went at midnight for pleasure, which was the point of the wager.

The tale was printed with a picture, and the picture shows the old man thrusting an open palm at the young man with an eye in it. That is why the editors of the 1992 Kokusho Kankōkai edition of Sekien, and Murakami Kenji in his Yōkai jiten, take the Kyoto story as the model Sekien was working from. The story itself never names its monster. The name arrived a century later.

The costume carried a meaning every reader of 1776 would have caught. A zatō was a rank in the Tōdōza, the guild that organised blind men in Japan under official patronage, and its members made their living as musicians, masseurs, acupuncturists and, by Sekien’s day, moneylenders. The picture takes a man the whole town would recognise and gives him back his sight at the wrong end of his arms.

Other painters copied the figure. The Tenpō-era scroll in the Matsui Bunko at Yatsushiro shows the same being under the name temebōzu, and a Bakemono-zukushi scroll in the collection of Yumoto Kōichi has a close match. Neither says a word about it. In 1928 Inui Yūhei reported an undated hand-copied picture book in the Shisui Bunko that draws a te-no-me and adds a single line: it is said to be born in overgrown grassland from the vital essence of heaven and earth. That is less an origin than an address, and it is the same field of grass Sekien drew.

The yōkai researcher Tada Katsumi has argued that the picture is a pun. Raising the hand-eyes, te-me o ageru, is an idiom for exposing a trick or a cheat. A shaven head suggests hageru, to go bald, which is also what a monster’s disguise does when it peels, and bōzu ni naru, to be left a monk, means losing at a game. The moon in the background is the bōzu card of a hanafuda deck. The susuki recalls the proverb about looking hard at a ghost and finding only withered pampas grass. On that reading the te-no-me is a joke about a fraud being caught out, which does very little to make it pleasant company.

The account that finally gives the creature a motive comes from Iwate, collected by Fujisawa Yoshio in Iwate no yōkai monogatari (1986). A traveller crossing a field at night sees a blind man coming towards him, an eyeball in each palm, using them to search for something. He runs to an inn and tells the innkeeper. A few days before, the innkeeper says, a blind man was killed on that ground by villains who took his money. He had wanted one look at their faces, and if his eyes could not give him that, then let there be eyes in his hands. The grudge became the te-no-me. The same thing, the innkeeper adds, happened in Echigo when a blind man was murdered there.

What the creature can do follows from its hands. It sees in the dark, and it follows its prey indoors. A temple did not keep it out and the boards of a chest did not stop it, and it took a grown man apart from the inside and left the outside whole. No source gives a charm, a prayer or a priest that turns it away. The monk in the Kyoto story survived by keeping still and keeping quiet.

Its limits are narrower than its reach. To look at anything it must hold up its hands, which makes it slow and hard to miss. The Iwate te-no-me is not hunting whoever passes; it is searching for particular faces, and the traveller who blundered into it escaped simply by running. It wants something specific. Nothing in either story says whether it would stop if it ever found what it was looking for.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Te-no-me?

The Te-no-me is a Japanese yōkai with no eyes in its face and an eye in the palm of the hand. Toriyama Sekien named and drew it in his 1776 picture book Gazu Hyakki Yagyō, showing a zatō, a blind man of the guild rank, standing in a moonlit field of susuki grass with both hands raised. Sekien gave the picture a name but no description.

What does the Te-no-me do to people?

In the oldest related story, from the 1677 collection Shokoku Hyakumonogatari, it kills. A young man goes to the burial ground at Shichijō-gawara in Kyoto on a wager, is chased by a white-haired old man with an eye in his palm, and is hidden by a monk inside a clothes chest. A sound like a dog gnawing a bone comes from beside the chest, and when the lid is opened the man’s bones have been drawn out and only his skin remains.

Where does the Te-no-me come from?

Sekien gave no origin. An undated picture book reported by Inui Yūhei in 1928 says it is born in overgrown grassland from the vital essence of heaven and earth. A folktale from Iwate, published by Fujisawa Yoshio in 1986, says it is the grudge of a blind man robbed and murdered on the road, who wished for eyes in his hands so he could see his killers’ faces.

Why does the Te-no-me have eyes in its hands?

In the Iwate folktale the eyes in the hands are the murdered blind man’s last wish, made into a monster. The yōkai researcher Tada Katsumi reads Sekien’s picture as a pun on te-me o ageru, an idiom meaning to expose a trick or a cheat, with the shaven head, the moon and the pampas grass each adding to the wordplay.

Is the Te-no-me the same as the Temebōzu?

The Temebōzu is the name given to the same figure in a Tenpō-era Hyakki Yagyō scroll held by the Matsui Bunko in Yatsushiro, Kumamoto. The painting copies Sekien’s Te-no-me, and like Sekien’s picture it has no accompanying explanation.