Heiroku

A half-naked figure hurrying through the dark, clutching a gohei — the wooden wand hung with folded zigzag paper strips that a Shinto priest uses to purify and to call a god down into a space.

That's it. That's the whole picture.

Sekien's caption, from 1784, is a single riddling line — something like: in the capital of flowers, with no shrine fixed... has some rough-spirited god come out in commotion?

And the scholarship, when you go looking, more or less shrugs. Details unknown. No folklore, no region, no story. His model was probably a red demon carrying the same wand in a medieval night-parade scroll, which is where he got a great many of his figures.

By the standards of this collection that's nothing. A shrug with an illustration.

Look at what he actually drew

But go back to the picture and read it slowly, because I think this obscure figure is quietly carrying the biggest idea in the whole tradition.

Here is someone holding the tool of a god — the gohei is not decoration, it's the implement that makes a place sacred and invites a deity to occupy it.

And he has nowhere to stand. No shrine fixed. He is out in the street, in the capital, at night, half-dressed, running.

That is a god with the equipment and no address.

The thesis

There's a widely-influential argument in Japanese folklore studies — Komatsu Kazuhiko's — that can be compressed to four words:

Yokai are unworshipped kami.

The claim is that the difference between a god and a monster is not what the being is, but whether it has a place, a rite, and people who show up. Give a powerful spirit a shrine and offerings and a festival, and it protects the village. Withdraw those, or never provide them, and the same being is out on the road at night, and now it's a yokai.

That reframes an enormous amount of this material. The poverty god who becomes a fortune god when honoured. The demon who kills seven monks and is enshrined for it. The foot through the ceiling that becomes a household guardian once it's washed with respect. The clothes-stripping crone at the river of the dead who ends up granting wishes.

Worship is the variable. It keeps being the variable.

And Sekien painted the argument in 1784 — divinity, unhoused, loose in the city with its own ritual wand still in its hand — about two centuries before anybody wrote the thesis down.

I don't think he was making a theoretical point. I think he was drawing something he found unsettling, and the reason it's unsettling is the reason the thesis is right.

Of all the figures who could stand at the door of a book like this one holding the whole argument, it's this one: a shivering wand-bearer with no shrine to go to.