Amikiri

Something is wrong with the nets.

The fishing nets left out drying on their poles have been cut through. So has the mosquito netting hung over the bed. So have the reed blinds. Not torn — cut, cleanly, by something with blades.

The thing that did it, if you ever saw it, is one of the strangest-looking creatures in the whole catalog: a body somewhere between a snake and a bird, with a long segmented tail, and at the front a pair of enormous lobster pincers. It flies. It goes for anything woven and open-meshed, and it snips.

That's the amikiri, the net-cutter, and it's a cousin of the kamikiri — the hair-cutter — who does the same thing to the back of your head while you're asleep.

It is almost certainly a pun

Here's where honesty is more fun than the legend.

Toriyama Sekien drew the amikiri in 1776 with no accompanying text at all — just the picture. And the scholarly assessment is blunt: there may be no authentic folk tradition behind it whatsoever. It looks very much like something Sekien made up.

Made up out of what? A homophone. In Japanese, ami means "net." Ami also means a kind of small shrimp, the mysid.

Which explains the design completely. Why does the net-cutter have a crustacean body and lobster claws? Because the artist was drawing the other ami. The creature is a play on words that grew armor and went out cutting things.

This was very much Sekien's habit. A striking number of his monsters are jokes that acquired anatomy, and once the picture existed, later readers took it at face value and started explaining what the creature did.

The job it got given afterwards

The function attached to it later is the interesting half, because it's real even though the monster isn't.

Cut nets were a genuine, expensive, maddening problem. A fishing net represented serious money and serious labour, and one morning it would be ruined — by a snag you never saw, by rot in the fibres, by rats, by any of a dozen causes that leave a similar mess and none of which anyone could prove.

So the damage got an author. The amikiri did it. Same job the kamikiri does when a woman finds a hank of her hair gone in the night, and the same job monsters have always done for unexplained losses: it converts an infuriating mystery into a story you can tell.

Call it folklore as an insurance report. Something has to go in the box marked cause.

The one modern sighting

There is exactly one account of an amikiri that isn't a picture — from Yamagata, in 1974, where fishing nets were found shredded and then, later, mosquito nets.

It's unverified and it stands completely alone. What it probably shows is the loop closing: a monster invented in a picture book in 1776, printed and reprinted for two centuries, eventually gets credited with a real morning's damage in the twentieth century. The image came first, the belief came second, and by the time anyone noticed the order it was too late to matter.