Himamushinyūdō

You are working late. The lamp is lit, the house is quiet, and you have a deadline.

And something hauls itself up from under the veranda — an old monk-ish thing, long and low — and licks the oil out of your lamp.

The light dims. Then it goes out. And you sit there in the dark with your work unfinished.

The best moral in Sekien's catalog

The caption explains exactly who this is, and it's a small masterpiece of spite.

A person who lives idly, idly — the phrase is roughly "stealing spare time," frittering away a life that was never applied to anything — becomes, after death, the himamushi nyūdō. The "idleness-bug monk."

And his eternal punishment is to go around sabotaging other people's night work.

Sit with the shape of that for a second, because it's psychologically sharper than most of what's here.

He isn't punished with pain, or hunger, or exile. He's condemned to become the thing that stops other people finishing. The man who never did anything with his own time spends eternity taking time away from people who are using theirs — which is, if you've ever known a certain kind of person, an unusually accurate observation about how idleness actually behaves. It doesn't sit quietly. It comes and finds you at eleven at night and asks if you want to take a break.

It's the same engine as the muddy figure rising out of a neglected rice paddy crying give back my field. Same catalog, same year, same moralizing: wasted land there, wasted time here.

He's partly a doodle

Sekien then does something that pulls the rug out, and does it on purpose.

He notes in his own caption that the name slides easily to "hemamushi" — because those sounds are interchangeable — which connects his creature to the hemamushi nyūdō.

That's not a monster. It's an Edo doodle game: a little cartoon figure of a monk, drawn by writing a fixed sequence of kana characters, where each stroke of the writing becomes part of the picture. Children learned it. It's essentially Japan's Kilroy — the thing you scribble in a margin to prove you were there.

So the ghost of the idle man is, by the artist's own admission, half a scribble promoted to a spirit. Which is either a joke about wasting time or the single most appropriate origin any creature in this book could have.

And underneath it, a real insect

There's one more layer, and it makes everything above better rather than worse.

The folklorist Tada proposed that himamushi is the cockroach.

Look at the fit. It hides by the hearth. It eats leftovers. It comes out at night. It licks fish-oil off lamps — which is a real behaviour, because Edo lamp oil was rendered from fish and the household's insects wanted it as much as the cats did. And it disturbs people working late simply by existing in the room.

That is the himamushi nyūdō, exactly, minus the theology.

The two readings aren't rivals. Sekien took the thing that actually crawled out from under the veranda at midnight and got into the lamp oil, and moralized the cockroach — gave it a biography, a sin, and a sentence.