Tenome

An old blind man reaches toward you.

And opens his hands.

There is an eye in each palm.

Where he came from

The Shokoku Hyaku Monogatari, 1677.

A blind man was killed and robbed by a scoundrel.

And his spirit rose, hunting for his killer's face — with eyes in its palms, because its face had none to give.

That's the whole origin, and it's the tightest piece of revenge-logic in the collection.

He needs to identify the man who killed him. In life he could not see faces. So in death he is given sight — exactly where his living hands had to do his seeing.

Not a gift. A tool for the job, issued in the only form that made sense for him.

And the reaching is the awful part

Think about what he's actually doing when he comes at you.

He is groping. Hands out, feeling forward — which is what a blind man does, and which is the most ordinary and least threatening gesture in the world until you know what's in the palms.

He isn't grabbing. He's looking.

Every time he reaches for a face, he's checking whether it's the one. And it never is, and he keeps going.

He appears as a zatō

Which matters more than it first seems.

The zatō were members of the blind guild — the licensed profession that covered musicians, masseurs, and moneylenders, and one of the very few structured livelihoods open to blind men in Edo Japan.

And blind travellers were a vulnerable class. On the road, alone, carrying whatever they'd earned, unable to see who was approaching.

The folklore knows this. The origin isn't a curse or a possession or a supernatural accident. It's a robbery-murder of exactly the person most likely to suffer one.

Sekien drew two other zatō figures in his catalogues — a giant one in a storm, a sea-going one. The blind man on the road is a recurring figure in this tradition, and he is almost always either feared or preyed upon, sometimes in the same book.

The classic encounter is a dare gone wrong

The standard account is a courage test.

Young men betting each other to go alone, at night, to Shichijōgawara — Kyoto's medieval burial ground, a place where bodies were disposed of rather than interred.

And the one who goes is pursued — by the groping, palm-staring figure, across open ground where the dead were left.

There's a darker variant of what happens to the caught: victims found as skin emptied of bones.

He has a relative

The kurayami-me — "darkness eyes" — which has eyes on its knees.

The displaced-eye family. Sight relocated to the wrong part of the body, which is a specific and durable horror.

Nobody in this tradition is frightened of an extra eye. They're frightened of an eye in the wrong place — because it means something is looking at you from a direction faces don't work in.

And he got out

The palm-eyes have travelled.

The Pale Man in Pan's Labyrinth — the pale sagging figure at the banquet table who picks his eyes up off a plate and presses them into his palms before he starts hunting — is the tenome, essentially exactly.

Guillermo del Toro has never made a secret of drawing on Japanese sources.

A blind man murdered on a road in 1677 is now one of the most recognized monster designs in world cinema, and most people who flinch at it have no idea whose robbery they're reacting to.