Narigama

Sekien's picture, from 1784, is a small hairy figure wearing an iron rice- kettle for a head, holding a votive plaque.

It's a good cartoon. But unlike most of his inventions, there's something real and still-practised standing behind it.

The kettle that sounds

Kamanari — "kettle-sounding."

When you heat a heavy iron rice-kettle, it sometimes makes a noise. A hum. A low roar that builds and changes. Anyone who has cooked over a fire has heard it and thought nothing of it.

Japan built a divination practice on it.

You listen to the kettle, and you read the fortune in the sound — its strength, its length, whether it comes at all.

And it is still performed, on a schedule

Kibitsu Shrine, in Okayama, performs the narukama shinji — the kettle-sounding rite. It is famous. It is scheduled. You can attend.

A priest heats the kettle, rice is placed in a sieve above it, and the assembled company listens. The roar is the answer.

And the origin legend attached to it is one of the best things I've come across in this whole tradition.

The demon who became the kettle

There was an oni named Ura, who was killed by the prince Kibitsuhiko.

Two things about that.

First — that fight is, by strong local tradition, the historical seed of Momotarō. The peach boy's demon-island expedition is this campaign, worn smooth by centuries of retelling.

Second, and better — Ura didn't stop existing.

He became an oracle god. And the way he speaks is the roar of the kettle.

Good fortune and ill, read in the sound of a cooking pot, because a defeated demon is in there answering.

He got a job

That's the pattern this tradition reaches for constantly, and here it is in its most peculiar form.

The dragon that demanded human sacrifice was ordained and given a shrine. The kappa boss beaten by a warlord was put on the water god's staff. The rebel who declared himself emperor was enshrined as the guardian of the capital.

And Ura — beheaded, defeated, the villain of Japan's most famous children's story — was retained permanently as a kitchen oracle.

You don't destroy the thing. You employ it. Forever, in a pot, answering questions about whether the harvest will be good.

The pacification-by-adoption arc, and this is the only version of it you can hear.

Sekien was showing off

A small note for anyone who likes watching a scholar work.

Sekien's caption for the narigama cites his source — a Chinese kettle-sounding creature called Renjo, from the Hakutaku hikai-zu.

That's the Bái Zé diagram tradition — the monster-catalogue supposedly dictated by the beast that met the Yellow Emperor and named every spirit in the world. The ur-text of monster-cataloguing, the thing Sekien's own profession descends from.

So he's not inventing. He's citing the founding document of his own field, in a caption, on a picture of a kettle with legs.

And he had a visual model too: the Muromachi-era Hyakki Yagyō scrolls — the Night Parade paintings themselves — already have a kettle-yokai marching in the procession, centuries before him.

And there's a story where the kettle stays silent

Ueda Akinari's Ugetsu Monogatari has a tale called "Kibitsu no Kama" — the Kettle of Kibitsu.

A marriage is proposed. The kettle rite is performed to test whether it will prosper.

The kettle makes no sound at all.

They go ahead with the wedding anyway.

It is one of the great ghost stories in Japanese literature, and everything that follows was announced in advance by a pot that declined to comment.