Dodomeki

A woman with unusually long arms, and along both arms — a hundred eyes.

Sekien drew her in 1779, and unlike most of his plates this one comes with a full explanation. It reads like a criminal record with the sentence attached.

She was a woman with long arms who habitually stole coins. And because of what she took, her arms grew the eyes of a hundred birds.

The pun, which is the whole creature

That only makes sense if you know one piece of Edo slang, and once you do, it's perfect.

Japanese copper coins had a square hole punched through the middle. The street name for them was *chōmoku* — literally "bird-eyes," because that's what a coin with a hole in it looks like.

So the woman spent her life palming bird-eyes. And now her arms are covered in them.

Every coin she ever lifted is now an eye, on the limb that lifted it, watching. The loot became surveillance.

It's punishment by denomination — she isn't marked with generic monstrous eyes, she's marked with the exact currency she stole, presumably at the exact count. And it's a version of a principle this tradition uses again and again: the route of the sin becomes the route of the punishment. Usually that arrives as karma. Here it arrives as wordplay, which is somehow worse.

Sekien faked his source

Now the detail that makes this entry genuinely important, and it's an uncomfortable one.

Sekien cited a text as his source for the dodomeki. The text is unverifiable — no such work appears to exist, and the scholarly read is that he invented a suitably Chinese-sounding old book to lend his brand-new monster a pedigree.

He did this more than once. It was part of the game; his catalogs are full of scholarly apparatus, and some of the apparatus is a joke aimed at readers who would enjoy the joke.

But look at what it establishes. Every fabricated "ancient record" that gets attached to a modern invention — every "this creature appears in an old Edo text" claim that dissolves when you check — is following a pattern set by the man who built the canon, in print, in 1779.

The master forged his own citation first.

There was probably real raw material in the mix: several places in Japan carry names written with the characters for "hundred eyes," and Utsunomiya has its own demon legend attached to such a district. But the scholarly reading treats those place-names as material for Sekien's pun, not as an older creature that matched his picture.

The later coat of paint

One more layer, and it's the kind worth flagging.

Modern retellings will tell you the eyes are the stolen coins themselves, transformed or fused into her skin.

That's a twentieth-century elaboration. It isn't in Sekien's text. It's a good addition — arguably better than the original — and it is exactly the sort of improvement that quietly becomes "the legend" within a generation or two if nobody writes down when it arrived.