Jizō

If you have been to Japan you have walked past hundreds of them. A small stone figure by the road, or at a crossroads, or in a row at the edge of a temple ground: a monk with a shaved head and a gentle face, often in a red bib, sometimes with a knitted cap, sometimes with a toy set at its feet.

That's Jizō. And once you know what the bibs are for, you don't walk past them the same way again.

The riverbank

The story behind it is called the Sai no Kawara — the dry, stony riverbed at the edge of the next world.

Children who died before their parents are said to gather there. They are told they cannot cross, because they died too early to have accumulated merit, and because their parents' grief is a weight on them.

So they are given something to do. They build small towers of stones on the riverbank — one stone for their father, one for their mother, one for each sibling — piling them up, patiently, as an offering.

And demons come and knock the piles over. And the children start again.

It is a Sisyphus built for the very small, and it is one of the bleakest images any tradition has produced.

What Jizō does

He comes to the riverbank.

He hides them in the sleeves of his robe. In the version Lafcadio Hearn recorded, the children run to him and take shelter in his clothing, and he carries them across.

That's the whole of his job here, and it's why he is described as one of the most loved of all Japanese divinities. He is a bodhisattva who declined to remain comfortably enlightened while anyone was still suffering — his vow covers the death-realms generally — and in Japanese folk practice, this is the piece of the vow that mattered most.

He also looks after travellers, and pilgrims, and the living young. Over the centuries he merged with the older stone guardians who already stood at village boundaries and crossroads, which is why he ends up on so many roadsides: two protective traditions consolidated into one gentle face.

The bibs, the stones, the toys

Everything you see on those statues is somebody's transaction with that story, and most of it is recent.

The stones stacked at his feet, or on his lap, are placed by people hoping to shorten the time a child spends at the riverbank. You add a stone; the pile the demons knock down is that much less work.

The bibs and the caps are dressed on the statues by parents. A red bib because red is the protective colour in this tradition, and a bib and a cap because that is what you put on a small child going out in the cold, and there is nothing else left to do for them.

The toys and the pinwheels are gifts, left where a child might find them.

And mizuko kuyō — the modern memorial rite for miscarried, stillborn, and aborted children — is performed under his guardianship, at temples with rows of small Jizō figures, each one dressed by a particular family.

Why it's in a book of monsters

Because this is where the tradition's machinery is put to its actual use.

Most of what's collected here is a way of explaining something — a noise, a light, an illness, a bad crossing. This is a way of bearing something, and it's the same machinery: a story, a figure, an object you can hold, and a small repeatable action for a situation that has no action in it.

The demons at the riverbank aren't villains to enjoy. They're the shape grief takes when it won't stop — the sense that the loss keeps happening, that nothing you build stays built.

And the answer the tradition gives is not that the demons are defeated. It's that somebody comes, and picks the children up, and the parents can put a stone on the pile.

Of everything in this collection, it is the one still most in use.