Tsukumogami

Also Known As: 付喪神, “joined mourning deity”; phonetically also written 九十九髪, “hair of ninety-nine”; tool specters, artifact spirits
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: Household containers, tools and instruments that receive souls after roughly a hundred years of service and become animate, mischievous and sometimes murderous specters.
Role in Mythos: They are the discarded material world answering back, and in their central medieval text they serve as proof that even non-sentient objects can attain buddhahood.
Relation to Humans: They begin as the loyal property of the people who then throw them out, and their grievance is that abandonment rather than any older enmity. They can be avoided by replacing possessions at the New Year, dispersed by Buddhist charms, and pacified by memorial services performed on worn-out goods.

In the last cold days of the twelfth month the capital turned itself inside out. Soot came down from the rafters in grey drifts, mats were beaten in the yards, and whatever had outlived its usefulness went out into the byways and alleys: split baskets, a mortar worn thin at the lip, straw sandals gone soft with rain. The city called this susuharai, the sweeping of soot, and its stated purpose was to strip a year of accumulated misfortune out of a household before the new one arrived. It had a second purpose that nobody in the lanes said out loud. The old things went out before they had time to notice.

A Muromachi handscroll called the Tsukumogami ki, the Record of Tool Specters, sets the rule down in its opening line. After a span of one hundred years, containers, tools and instruments receive souls, and, like everything with a soul of its own, develop independent spirits and grow prone to tricking people. The text attributes this to a Chinese work it names as the Miscellaneous Records of Yin and Yang. No such book has ever been found. It is entirely possible the author invented an authority to lend weight to something his readers already half believed.

The name is a pun that hardened into a species. Written 付喪神 it looks suitably grim, something like joining and mourning and deity, but those characters are phonetic borrowings chosen because they look monstrous. The usual way of writing the same syllables is 九十九髪, the hair of ninety-nine, and it comes out of a poem in the sixty-third episode of the Tales of Ise, where a man describes an old woman as tsukumogami, a year short of a hundred. Tsukumo was also an old name for a marsh plant whose pale seed head resembles a white-haired head. The character for one hundred, stripped of its topmost stroke, becomes the character for white. Longevity, thinning hair and a faint sense of something no longer quite ordinary are all folded into the word before a single kettle sprouts legs.

Well past midnight, in a storehouse smelling of rice dust and old lacquer, a biwa nobody has tuned in three generations leans against the wall and begins, softly and badly, to play itself. There is no one to hear it. It goes on anyway, doing the work it was made for long after the last hand that wanted it done went into the ground.

They are easier to picture than most Japanese spirits because people drew them, repeatedly, for four hundred years. In the scrolls they are the household inventory with the volume turned up: a paper umbrella balanced on one leg with a single eye rolling above its ribs, a sandal grown a tongue, a rosary walking like a small monk, koto and biwa with faces pressed up out of their soundboards. Scale is both the joke and the problem. They eat human flesh, and they are roughly the size of the objects they used to be, so they lack an oni’s stature entirely and come across as weird rather than terrifying. An older painting, the fourteenth-century Fudo riyaku engi, shows five illness spirits called up by a yin-yang diviner, and two of them are containers wearing fur and paws: a shallow handled basin and a large bowl, both furred, both wrong.

How they wake depends on which copy is open. The story survives in two families of manuscript, one at Sofukuji in Gifu and a spread of later scrolls in Kyoto, Tokyo and the National Diet Library, and they disagree about the order of events and about how much of the tale to tell. In all of them the discarded goods gather in the alleys and take counsel. A rosary named Ichiren Novice argues against revenge and is beaten half out of existence with a club by one Rough John. A scroll calling himself Professor Classical Literature carries the meeting with a lecture on the art of yin-yang transformation, and on the night of setsubun, the eve of the lunar New Year, a creation god gives them their bodies.

What follows is a grudge with a floor plan. They take a den behind Mount Funaoka, a Heian burial ground close enough to the city to be convenient, and they range in and out of the capital taking humans and animals for food. They build a castle of flesh and a pond of blood, and they boast that celestial pleasures could not surpass theirs. They also compose poetry, one of them reworking a famous verse from the Kokinshu so that the world would be at peace in spring if only it contained no people. Deciding that a proper cult requires a god, they name their maker the Great Shape-Shifting God, build him a portable shrine and carry him along First Avenue in festival procession, exactly as the great shrines do. The procession meets the Prince Regent’s party coming the other way. A written charm the Regent carries, the Sonsho darani, flares up of its own accord and goes for them, and the tool specters scatter into the lanes.

The rest is imperial machinery. The Emperor hears of it, a bishop performs rites in the palace, Buddhist divine boys appear above the roof and fly to the den, and the tsukumogami capitulate. They take the tonsure under the rosary they nearly killed, ask how enlightenment might be had quickly, and attain buddhahood through the Shingon teaching of realising buddhahood in this very body. The tale ends with a sales pitch: escape the net of exoteric Buddhism and enter the esoteric school.

Animate objects were older than the name for them. The Tales of Times Now Past, compiled around 1120, has a copper decanter dug up on East Third Avenue that had been walking about as a three-foot man, judged harmless by a diviner. The same collection has a small oil pot that kills a sick girl, and there the malice belongs to a spirit that got into the pot rather than to the pot itself. The Tsukumogami ki knows this older argument perfectly well and puts it in the mouths of exoteric scholars, who ask how inanimate objects could possibly have souls.

By the eighteenth century most of the menace had drained away. Toriyama Sekien closed his four-book yokai series in 1784 with Hyakki tsurezure bukuro, a title that swaps the character for demon out of “night procession of a hundred demons” and drops in the identical-sounding character for vessel, then fills the pages with the specters of biwa and koto and kettles and book carts. His tool spirits are company rather than threat, and the little helpers of Edo comic books are further from the flesh castle still.

Their powers follow from what they are. They move, speak, plot and hold festivals; they are invisible to their victims, so that the people of the capital could do nothing but pray; and they mimic human life closely enough to write poems about how much better it would be without humans in it. Their limits follow just as neatly. They cannot fly, which is why they settled near Funaoka rather than at a proper distance, having reasoned that a den too far from human habitation would be inconvenient for obtaining food. Written Buddhist power scatters them on contact. And the whole species can be prevented by housework: renewing the hearth fire, drawing fresh water and replacing everything from clothing to furniture each New Year keeps any object from staying in service long enough to develop opinions.

There is one more remedy, and it is the reason the scrolls exist. A priest could be engaged to perform a memorial service over worn-out goods, for a fee. A story that starts with rubbish in a back lane ends with a working market in absolution for it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a tsukumogami?

A tsukumogami is a Japanese tool specter, an ordinary household object that receives a soul after long service and becomes an animate spirit. The medieval Tsukumogami ki names containers, tools and instruments specifically, though the same text also treats clothing and furniture as vulnerable. In the surviving handscrolls they appear as umbrellas, sandals, rosaries, kettles and musical instruments grown eyes and limbs.

How does an object become a tsukumogami?

The Tsukumogami ki gives a span of roughly one hundred years of service, after which an object receives a soul and begins to trick people. In the story itself the transformation is not automatic: the discarded objects hold a meeting, receive a lecture on yin-yang transformation, and are given their forms by a creation god on the night of setsubun, the eve of the lunar New Year.

Are tsukumogami dangerous?

In their earliest full account they are lethal. The tsukumogami of the Tsukumogami ki take humans and animals for food, build a castle of flesh and a pond of blood behind Mount Funaoka, and cannot be seen by the people they hunt. By the Edo period the danger had largely evaporated, and the tool spirits drawn by Toriyama Sekien in 1784 are closer to mischievous company than to man-eaters.

Where does the name tsukumogami come from?

The characters 付喪神 are phonetic borrowings chosen for their ominous look. The same syllables are more usually written 九十九髪, “hair of ninety-nine,” a phrase from the sixty-third episode of the Tales of Ise describing an old woman one year short of a hundred. Tsukumo was also an old name for a marsh plant whose pale seed head resembles white hair.

How do you stop a tsukumogami?

Prevention was the main defence: renewing the hearth fire, drawing fresh water and replacing household goods each New Year stopped any object serving long enough to wake. In the Tsukumogami ki the specters are scattered by a Sonsho darani charm and then subdued by Buddhist divine boys. The scrolls also recommend paying a priest to perform a memorial service over discarded possessions.