Te-no-me

Also Known As: 手の目, “hand eyes”; also written Tenome; 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 one open eye in the centre of each palm, so that it sees only where it reaches.
Role in Mythos: It is a night creature of the graveyard and the open field, best known from a 1677 tale in which it strips a man of his skeleton and from Toriyama Sekien’s 1776 picture that gave the figure its name.
Relation to Humans: It appears to people alone after dark, at burial grounds and on empty roads, and in the oldest surviving account it kills the man it meets. A regional version collected in Iwate makes it the transformed grudge of a blind man murdered for his money, hunting a particular set of faces rather than anyone who passes.

The moon is up over a field of susuki grass, the plumes gone the colour of old silver, and a man in a blind musician’s robes is standing in the middle of it with both hands raised. His face is empty. Where the eyes belong there is smooth skin and a suggestion of closure. In each of his lifted palms an eyeball sits wet and open, and both of them are aimed outward, at whatever is in front of him.

Toriyama Sekien printed that image in Gazu Hyakki Yagyō in 1776 and wrote three characters under it: 手の目, hand eyes. He wrote nothing else. His bestiary carries no explanatory text at all, which means the picture is the entire contribution of the man who named the creature. Everything else anyone can say about the te-no-me has to be gathered from what came before that woodblock and what came after it.

What came before is a tale printed ninety-nine years earlier, in Shokoku Hyakumonogatari of 1677, the first Japanese book to put the word hyakumonogatari on its cover and one of the founding texts of the whole Edo appetite for ghost stories. The story is called, with the flatness of a coroner’s note, the matter of the man whose bones were drawn out by a monster. A man goes at night to the burial ground at Shichijō-gawara on the edge of Kyoto, out where the riverbed and the graves and the outcast quarters all ran together, and he goes on a dare. Something meets him there in the shape of an old man of about eighty. It comes at him. When it puts out its hands there are eyeballs in the palms.

He runs. There is a temple nearby and a monk inside it, and the monk hides him in a nagamochi, one of the long lidded chests families kept clothing in. The thing follows him to the temple. What the man hears through the boards, lying in the dark with his knees folded, is a noise beside the chest like a dog working at a bone, patient and wet and unhurried. Then it stops. When the monk lifts the lid, the bones have been taken out of the man’s body and only the skin is left. The story does not explain how.

That 1677 tale carries its own illustration, and the illustration already shows the eyes in both hands, which is why the compilers who have worked on Sekien since have generally treated it as the thing he was looking at when he drew. Murakami Kenji’s Yōkai jiten and the Kokusho Kankōkai edition of the Gazu Hyakki Yagyō both make the connection. The important detail there is quiet and easy to skip: the 1677 story never calls the creature te-no-me. It has no name in the oldest version. The name is Sekien’s, applied a century later to a monster that had been walking around unlabelled.

The costume is not decoration. The figure wears the shaven head and plain robe of a zatō, a rank within the tōdōza, the guild that organised blind men in Tokugawa Japan into recognised trades. Its members worked as masseurs and moxibustion practitioners and moneylenders, and among them were the biwa hōshi who travelled the roads chanting the Heike with a lute across their laps. Any reader in 1776 would have placed the figure instantly. It is a professional blind man who has been given his sight back at the wrong end of his arms.

The yōkai researcher Tada Katsumi has argued that the picture is a visual pun and always was. To raise the hand-eye, te-me o ageru, is an idiom for exposing a swindle. A shaven head is a bōzu, and things that are bōzu go bald, hageru, which is also what a disguise does when it comes off. The moon in Sekien’s background is the bōzu card in a hanafuda deck. The susuki is the punchline of an old 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 joke being seen through, which does very little to make it less unpleasant to meet.

Other painters copied it. The Tenpō-era Hyakki Yagyō scroll in the Matsui Bunko carries the same figure under the name temebōzu, and a similar one turns up in a Bakemono-zukushi scroll in the Yumoto Kōichi collection. Neither offers a word of explanation. The only early gloss anyone has found is a line Inui Yūhei reported in 1928 from an undated picture book in the Shisui Bunko, which says the te-no-me is generated in overgrown thickets of grass out of the vital essence of heaven and earth. That is not an origin so much as a habitat, and it puts the creature exactly where Sekien drew it.

The story that finally explains it comes from Iwate, collected by Fujisawa Mitsuo and published in 1986. A traveller is crossing open country at night when a blind man comes toward him with both hands up, palms turned out, sweeping them slowly across the ground and the air as though searching for something he has dropped. The traveller does not wait to find out what. He runs to an inn, and the innkeeper hears him out and says: a few days ago a blind man was killed on that stretch of road by robbers who took his money, and what he wanted at the end was one look at their faces, and if there were to be no eyes in his head then let there at least be eyes in his hands. That wish is what is out there walking. The same thing had happened, the innkeeper adds, in Echigo, when a blind man was murdered there.

It is worth noticing how that account changes the anatomy from a deformity into a piece of engineering. The eyes are at the ends of the arms because the arms are what reach into a face. To look at anything the creature has to lift its hands and hold them, which is slow, deliberate, and impossible to do casually. Its field of vision is the length of its own reach. What it cannot do is glance.

Its powers are correspondingly narrow and correspondingly awful. It sees in the dark, from an angle no one guards. In the Kyoto tale it takes a grown man apart from the inside without opening him, working through the wall of a chest, leaving something the monk could lift out in both hands. No charm turns it, no priest banishes it, no ritual in any of the sources sends it away, and it leaves when it is finished rather than when it is beaten.

The limits are in the same places. The Iwate te-no-me does nothing at all to the traveller who blunders into it; it is hunting specific faces and he is not one of them, and a grudge that precise is a grudge that most people can walk past. It must raise its hands to look, which announces it. And the thing driving it is not appetite but an unanswered question about who did this, which means that unlike most of what walks the Edo night, it could in principle be satisfied.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Te-no-me?

The Te-no-me is a Japanese yōkai with no eyes in its face and one eyeball set in each palm. It was named and illustrated by Toriyama Sekien in his 1776 bestiary Gazu Hyakki Yagyō, where it appears as a zatō, a member of the guild of blind men, standing in a moonlit field of pampas grass with both hands raised.

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

In the oldest account, a tale from the 1677 collection Shokoku Hyakumonogatari, the Te-no-me kills. A man visits the burial ground at Shichijō-gawara in Kyoto on a dare, is attacked by an old man with eyes in his palms, and hides inside a wooden chest in a nearby temple. The monster follows, makes a sound like a dog working at a bone, and when the chest is opened the man’s bones have been drawn out and only his skin remains.

Where does the Te-no-me come from?

There are two answers. The 1677 Kyoto tale gives the creature no origin at all and no name; Sekien supplied the name in 1776 and no explanation. A folktale from Iwate published by Fujisawa Mitsuo in 1986 says the Te-no-me is the grudge of a blind man robbed and murdered on a road, who wanted one look at his killers’ faces and wished for eyes in his hands since he had none in his head.

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

The Iwate story treats it as a wish granted literally: a blind man who could not see his attackers got sight at the ends of his arms instead. The yōkai researcher Tada Katsumi has offered a different reading of Sekien’s picture, arguing it is a visual pun on the phrase te-me o ageru, meaning to expose a trick, reinforced by the shaven head and the moon and grass in the background.

Is the Te-no-me blind?

The Te-no-me has no functioning eyes in its face, so its only sight comes from the eyeballs in its palms. That means it has to raise and hold up its hands to look at anything, and its field of vision reaches no further than its own arms.