Shirouneri

An old kitchen dishcloth — a fukin — gone grey with years of use.

And it rises as a small ragged dragon made of cloth, undulating through the house.

Sekien's 1784 caption is a single line:

> An old fukin, transformed.

That's the whole entry, as he wrote it.

The word he chose is lovely

The caption uses *yōei, which describes the way things billow in the wind* — the motion of laundry on a line, or a banner, or a sail.

So the movement is specified even though nothing else is. It doesn't fly and it doesn't crawl. It billows, dragon-shaped, along the corridor.

That's a very precise piece of observation about what a cloth actually does when it moves, and it's the only thing Sekien tells you.

And the name is a joke about a nickname

Shirouneri puns on "Shiroururi" — which is a nonsense word.

It comes from the Tsurezuregusa, Yoshida Kenkō's fourteenth-century essays. There's a passage where a priest gives a colleague an absurd nickname — "Shiroururi" — which means nothing at all, and the essay's amusement is that it somehow suits him anyway.

So the dishcloth dragon is named after a made-up insult from a medieval essay collection.

Which is a joke aimed at readers who would recognize it — and Sekien's audience did.

That essayist keeps turning up

This is the finding rather than the flourish.

The Tsurezuregusa supplies Sekien with an extraordinary amount of material, and you can list the harvest:

Essay 89 — the account of the nekomata, and it's a genuine warning: a man frightened of the cat-monster who falls into a stream in the dark and is grabbed by something, which turns out to be his own dog, delighted to see him.

Essay 55 — a complaint about architecture and how houses should be built, which Sekien turned into the ceiling-licker.

Essay 72 — a list of things that are unpleasant in excess: too many possessions, too many books on a cart, too much dust on a rubbish heap. Which became the dust-heap king.

Essay 60 — Shiroururi. The joke.

A warning, a complaint, a list, and a joke — one fourteenth-century essayist, supplying an eighteenth-century monster catalogue with four completely different kinds of material.

(And the full count across the catalogues runs to seven essays.)

Cloth animates more readily than anything

Once you've got the dishcloth, look at the rest of the textile family.

There's a flying bolt of white cotton that comes out of the dark and winds around your head.

There's an obi — a sash — that turns into a serpent.

There's a kosode that keeps the shape of the woman who wore it, and moves.

And here's an old dishcloth going dragon-shaped down the hall.

Apart from fire, no material in this tradition comes alive as readily as cloth — which makes sense, because cloth is the household thing that already moves on its own in any draught, in the corner of your eye, at night.

And there's a slime problem, which is somebody's fault

You will read that the shirouneri attacks people — assaulting them with "unpleasant mucus and foul odours that cause unconsciousness."

That is not Sekien.

It derives from Yamada Norio's story "The Vendetta of an Old Dishcloth" — and the Japanese record itself flags Yamada's work as containing fabricated yokai lore.

Yamada is the most prolific confirmed fabricator in this collection. He's responsible for invented colour-coding on one creature, invented variants on another, and here he arrives in the kitchen.

Sekien's original is a pun on a medieval nickname and nothing else. The slime is twentieth-century.

The real one is better. An old rag, worn out in service, going up the hallway like a banner in a draught, with no grievance and no attack — just a thing that was used until it changed.

There's a bronze of it on Mizuki Road in Sakaiminato. The revival honoured even the rags.