Shamichōrō

A master's shamisen, discarded once its player's day was done, risen up as what Sekien calls the "shamisen elder."

His 1784 caption: the spirit of the instrument of one who led this art.

The name is a joke, and the joke is about promotion

Shamichōrō folds two things together.

There's a proverb: a shami cannot leap straight to chōrō.

A shami is a novice monk — the lowest rank. A chōrō is an elder — the top. And the proverb means what it looks like: you cannot skip the ranks. You serve your time, you rise in order, nobody vaults to the top.

And shami is also the first half of shamisen.

So: the shamisen elder — an instrument that made chōrō without going through the grades.

And behind that is an essay about a party

Sekien's caption points at a specific piece of writing: essay 134 of the *Tsurezuregusa, Yoshida Kenkō's Essays in Idleness*, from the 1330s.

The essay is about the unskilled seated among the accomplished.

The person at the gathering who is out of their depth. Who doesn't have the training, is sitting with people who do, and knows it — and everyone else knows it too, and nobody says anything.

That's the discomfort Sekien attached to a discarded instrument.

Which is the section's whole gag

Sekien drew a string section, and each member has a different complaint.

The biwa — grieving its owner's neglect. Nobody plays it. It sat in the corner. That's a complaint about love.

The koto — grieving its repertoire's obsolescence. The pieces it knew went out of style. That's a complaint about fashion.

The shamisen — grieving interrupted seniority. It served under a master and got shelved before it earned its rank. That's a complaint about promotion.

Three instruments. Love, fashion, and promotion.

Which is not a bestiary. That's a guild grievance meeting, seated in order, with strings.

And it's the most useful thing to know about the tool-spirits generally: they are almost never frightening, and almost always aggrieved about their working conditions. The umbrella, the sandal, the dust-rag, the tea kettle — every one of them is a complaint about how it was treated on the job.

Sekien's tool-spirits are workplace grievances with faces.

And the essayist keeps turning up

One more thing, and it's a finding rather than a flourish.

The Tsurezuregusa — Kenkō's essay collection, fourteenth century, one of the canonical works of Japanese prose — is cited by Sekien over and over.

Essays 16, 55, 60, 72, 89, 134, 226.

Seven separate essays, each supplying the conceit or the caption for a different monster.

Which upgrades from coincidence to conclusion: the Tsurezuregusa is the single most productive literary source behind Sekien's catalogues.

A fourteenth-century monk, writing short reflections on manners, taste, transience and the awkwardness of social occasions, turns out to be the hidden co-author of a large chunk of Japan's monster canon — four hundred years later, without ever mentioning a monster.