Mokumokuren

A paper sliding screen in a neglected house. It's torn — old paper, small holes all through it, the way it goes.

And every hole has an eye in it.

That's the mokumokuren. It's one of the most reproduced monster images in Japan, and once you've seen the picture it does not leave.

It's a picture first, and everything else came after

I want to be straight about this before going further, because it's the honest version and it's also the better story.

The mokumokuren was invented by Toriyama Sekien, in 1781, for his monster catalogue. It has no folk tradition behind it. Nobody's grandmother in a village somewhere told this one. It is an artist's idea, published in a book.

And then it did something interesting: over the next two centuries, it grew folklore.

This happens more than you'd expect. The famous giant skeleton everybody thinks is ancient was invented in the 1960s. The mokumokuren is the same phenomenon with a 185-year head start — long enough that the invention has been absorbed completely and now reads as immemorial.

The mechanism is identical. Only the date differs. And the date is the only reason one feels like folklore and the other feels like a hoax.

What grew on it

Here are the tales that accreted afterwards, and they're worth having.

The frugal merchant. A man encounters the eyes — and rather than fleeing, he harvests them and sells them to a surgeon.

Which is a wonderful thing for a story to do. The house is full of supernatural eyes and his response is there's a market for those. Commerce beats horror. That's an Edo answer if ever there was one.

The traveller who ignored them. A man sleeps in a ruined house, sees the eyes, decides not to make anything of it — and wakes up without his own.

A straight trade. He declined to look, so the house took the equipment.

And the cure is housework

This is my favourite part, and it's the part that tells you what the thing actually is.

You get rid of a mokumokuren by repairing the screens.

That's it. Re-paper the shōji. Fix the holes. The spirit has nowhere to be.

Which puts it in a very specific company. There's a monster that lives on the scum in an unscrubbed bathtub, and leaves when you clean the bathroom. There's one that appears on a neglected household altar, and leaves when you tend it.

And now the torn screens.

These aren't threats. They're the household's maintenance schedule with faces on. Every one of them appears where a job has been left undone, and every one of them is dispelled by doing the job.

Which reframes the whole picture. The eyes aren't the point.

The point is that a house nobody is looking after starts looking at you. The neglect becomes attention. You stopped noticing the building, so the building began noticing you.

That's a genuinely unsettling idea about poverty and disrepair, and Sekien got there in one image with no story attached.

The name

Mokumokuren is something like "many eyes" or "continuous eyes."

There may also be a pun buried in it. Moku is the word for counting points on a go board — the intersections where stones are placed. A grid of regular openings, each one a moku, waiting to be filled.

A paper screen is a grid. Every hole is a point. Every point gets occupied.

I can't confirm Sekien meant it, and his caption would settle it. But he was exactly the sort of man who would.