Kokuribaba

An old woman spinning thread. A cat resting beside her. A temple kitchen.

It is the most grandmotherly scene in the entire catalogue — the domestic picture you'd hang up for comfort.

And then you read Sekien's caption.

The résumé

She is a monk's widow, from generations back, who lived in the kuri — the temple's kitchen and storage quarters.

She stole food and money from the parishioners.

Then she began exhuming corpses — to make garments from their hair, and to eat their flesh.

Embezzlement, grave-robbery, cannibalism, escalating through one biography, all of it conducted inside the temple.

Nothing in the picture shows any of it. The spinning wheel, the cat, the hearth. The horror is entirely in the voice-over, and the mismatch is deliberate.

It's about the clergy

The scholarly reading is that she's a jab at corrupt Edo temple establishments — and the design of the attack is precise.

She lives off the parishioners twice. First their alms, then their bodies.

And she's drawn as the institution's own grandmother, in its own back rooms, doing this out of sight of the hall where people come to pray.

That places her in a small but pointed tradition. This collection has more than one creature whose real function is institutional criticism wearing a monster's face — the priest condemned to eat the corpses of the parish he buried for money, and the muddy figure rising out of a neglected field crying give back my field.

Sekien was drawing monsters. He was also, fairly regularly, drawing complaints.

The mirror image

There's a structural joke underneath, and it's good.

At the river of the dead there is an official — an old woman — whose job is to strip the clothes from the newly dead so their sins can be weighed.

That's a licensed office. Appointed, procedural, part of the afterlife's administration.

The kokuribaba does the identical harvest — clothing off the dead, materials off the dead — without appointment, in a temple's back rooms, for herself.

The customs office of the afterlife, privatized, and gone feral.

On provenance

Whether there's any folklore under her at all is openly doubted. She looks like a Sekien invention.

Her name may come from a pun on *mukuri-kokuri* — an old bogey-phrase used to frighten children, which itself may descend from terror-cant of the Mongol invasions. A word for scaring children, made into a creature.

And there's a modern layer: post-war texts flattened her into a generic grave-robbing temple hag, and one twentieth-century author printed variants recasting her as a vengeful dead woman or a predatory temple spirit.

That author's name has come up repeatedly in this collection, and always for the same reason: he invented supernatural accounts and attributed them to real places. Another line for that audit.