Bakezōri

Late at night, from the entryway of the house, the sound of small feet running.

It's a straw sandal. One of yours — worn out, trodden through, kicked off in the corner of the porch and forgotten. It has grown little legs and one wide eye and it is tearing up and down the hallway, singing:

Kararin, kororin, kankororin — three eyes and two teeth!

That's the bakezōri, and it is the tsukumogami doctrine at its silliest.

The hundred-year rule

The doctrine goes like this: a tool that reaches a hundred years of age wakes up. It grows a face and limbs, and it has opinions — chiefly about how it was treated by the household that used it and then threw it out.

The bakezōri's motives are recorded plainly: boredom and frustration, or straightforward revenge and jealousy. Its behaviour is mostly petty. It runs about at night. It pesters. And then it either joins the other awakened objects — falling in with the great procession of animated junk that walks through Japanese folklore on summer nights — or it simply leaves home.

That's the sanction. Not a curse. Your shoes walk out on you.

Which makes it, explicitly, a cautionary tale rather than an encounter report. Nobody claims to have met a bakezōri. It's a lesson about not treating your footwear carelessly, delivered to children, with a song.

The song is stolen, and the theft is provable

Now the good part, because this small silly creature happens to carry the single cleanest piece of evidence in this collection about how folklore gets scrambled.

Look at the lyric again: three eyes and two teeth.

A zōri is a flat woven straw sandal. It has no teeth. It has nothing that could be called teeth.

A geta, though — the raised wooden clog — stands on two wooden crosspieces, and the Japanese word for those supports is ha. Teeth. A geta has, literally and by name, two teeth. It also has three holes for its thong. Three eyes.

The song describes a clog, in precise anatomical detail, and it is being sung by a sandal.

The scholarly account is that the original tale, from Iwate, was about geta. When the story was compiled and recompiled into the modern yokai canon, the clog's song got handed to the sandal, and nobody noticed the mismatch because nobody was counting.

So the bakezōri's borrowed biography can be dated by dentition. You can prove the swap from the lyric alone.

There's a competing popular reading, and it's charming enough to keep: that the sandal is mocking the geta — trash-talking the fancy wooden shoe from the doorway. Both readings can sit together, and honestly the second one is what the song became once the first was forgotten.

The three that got thrown away

The bakezōri completes a trio. The umbrella. The lantern. The sandal.

Those three are the household-object monsters that everyone in Japan can draw, and it is not a coincidence which three won. They are the cheapest, most used, most disposable objects in Edo life — the things that wore out constantly, got replaced without a thought, and ended in a pile by the door.

The tsukumogami doctrine has a quiet class politics to it, and this is where it shows: the things that come back are the things you threw away.

There's one more layer worth knowing. The straw sandal is the most ritually-charged object in Japanese folk practice — worn on the head to survive a night procession, thrown as payment to something following you, left out as a toll. It carries boundary-magic all through the tradition.

So of course the tradition warned you to be decent to it at home. The object you rule by day rules the entryway at night.