The Tsurezure Bukuro Remainder

Sekien's fourth catalogue runs to about fifty plates, and this collection has given the famous ones their own pages: the hopping umbrella, the lute, the mirror, the masks, the dishcloth dragon, the crockery general, the bell-woman, the inkstone.

This page is for the other twenty-six.

The parade's back rows — and read in bulk they prove the volume's point better than its stars do.

The frame

Sekien casts the whole book as things seen in a dream after reading the Tsurezuregusa — Yoshida Kenkō's fourteenth-century essays.

Which is why so many of these are puns on that book, and why the volume opens and closes with the same image: the Takarabune, the treasure ship of the seven lucky gods.

Fortune at both ends, and the household in between.

What's actually in the ranks

The wardrobe. A tall court cap (Osakōburi). A shoe (Kutsutsura). A fur robe (Bake-no-kawagoromo). A standing-collar robe, drawn as a tengu-abbot's vestment (Eritategoromo). Riding chaps (Mukumukabaki). A raincoat and sandal, paired as a single walker (Minowaraji).

The tack. A saddle (Kurayarō). And a stirrup (Abumi-guchi).

The kit. A plumed spear (Yarikechō). A torch (Taimatsumaru). A gourd (Hyōtankozō). A shell-box (Kaichigo). A horned ewer (Tsunohanzō). A sake cup (Chokuboron). An old basket, on fire (Korōka).

The temple. A priest's whisk (Hossumori). A gong (Shōgorō). A mortar (Nyūbachibō). A wooden fish — the drum struck during sutras (Mokugyodaruma). A sceptre that moves on its own (Nyoijizai). A zen kettle (Zenfushō).

And the broom.

The broom deserves a line

Hahakigami — the broom kami.

Which is a small joke with a sharp edge, because the founding story of this whole doctrine is about the year-end soot-sweeping: the great clean-out where households threw away their old tools, and the tools rebelled.

So here is the sweeping's own instrument, deified.

The broom did the clearing out. And it is, itself, a hundred-year-old tool.

Nobody sweeps the sweeper away.

And one of them is genuinely sad

Among twenty-six jokes there is one mournful figure, and it's easy to miss.

Abumi-guchi. A stirrup.

It belonged to a soldier who fell in battle. The stirrup was lost on the field and never recovered.

And it is described as waiting — unaware of the soldier's death.

It doesn't haunt anybody. It has no grievance and no target. It is simply still at the battlefield, where it was dropped, waiting for a rider who is not coming back, because nobody told it.

Equipment as a loyal dog.

In a volume of puns about caps and shoes and sake cups, Sekien put in one piece of tack sitting in a field, and did not draw attention to it.

Why the bulk matters

Because taken together, the back rows show what the fourth catalogue actually is.

Sekien didn't compile a bestiary. He inventoried a household and a wardrobe — cap, shoe, robe, saddle, stirrup, ewer, broom, cup, kettle, spear, whisk, gong — and set the whole lot marching.

The parade is a house turned inside out.

Everything you own, in the street, at night, in procession, in the order it happened to be discarded.

And bracketing it at both ends: the treasure ship.