Dorotabō

A rice paddy that nobody is looking after any more. The water gone stagnant, the weeds up, the banks slumping.

At night something comes up out of the mud. It's black with muck to the waist, it has one eye, and the hand it raises has three fingers. And it shouts, over and over, until the sun comes up:

Give back my field. Give back my field.

Who it is

The story Sekien attached to the picture in 1781 is the whole thing, and it doesn't need a monster to hurt.

An old man made that field. Not bought it — made it. Cleared it, levelled it, banked it, dug the channels, worked it for a lifetime. Building a paddy by hand is brutal, and he did it, and then he died and left it to his son.

The son let it go. Drank, or gambled, or simply couldn't be bothered — and in the versions that sting most, sold it out from under his father's bones.

So the old man comes back up through the mud of the field he built, and asks for it back, all night, every night, from a son who is not going to give it back.

It's an editorial cartoon

Being straight about provenance: there's little sign of an older folk tradition here. This looks like Sekien's own authorship — a picture with a moral caption, aimed at the landowning readership of Edo.

Which makes it something more interesting than a monster. It's a political cartoon about land stewardship, wearing a ghost's face.

And the message is economic, not supernatural. A field is stored labour. What the son inherited wasn't an asset, it was decades of somebody's back, and letting it silt up is a form of desecration serious enough to raise the dead.

Japanese folklore keeps a small set of these — the rat-swarm that comes for institutional injustice, the upside-down pillar that curses a house for a carpenter's slighted craft. Duty-to-property yokai. The dorotabō is their agricultural member.

The three fingers are conventionally read as the three Buddhist poisons — greed, anger, and ignorance, the vices that lost the field. It's a reading repeated almost everywhere, though it's worth knowing it's an interpretation rather than something Sekien spelled out.

It got louder

One thing the eighteenth century couldn't have planned.

Japan's countryside is emptying. There are hundreds of thousands of hectares of abandoned farmland across the country — fields that families worked for generations, going back to reed and weed because the children moved to the cities and nobody is left to farm them. There's a Japanese word for it, and there are government programmes about it.

Which means that a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old cartoon about a neglected paddy now describes a national condition, and the cry coming out of the mud reads considerably less like a ghost story than it used to.