Wanyūdō

An ox-cart wheel in flames, with a man's shaved head at the hub, rolling the night roads between hell and here.

Look at it and it takes your soul.

It comes with a door charm

That's what makes the wanyūdō unusual, and it's the reason this entry matters more than most.

Sekien printed the counter-measure.

His 1779 caption says the thing "steals the souls of those who see its form" — and then prescribes the remedy: paper on your door, reading

> This place is the village of Shōbō.

It's a Confucian allusion. Zengzi — Confucius's disciple — refused to enter a village whose name was ill-omened, on the grounds that a decent man doesn't go where the name is wrong.

So the slip means, roughly: the reputation of this place is such that you would not come in.

And here's why that matters: a yokai with a door-charm is a yokai people acted on.

Most of the catalogue is pictures. This one has an apotropaic practice attested in the catalogue itself — somebody was writing that phrase and pasting it up.

Who he was

The gloss: the condemned soul of a tyrannical daimyō who used to drag his victims behind his ox cart.

Punishment shaped like the crime. He is now the wheel.

And he guards hell's gate, and commutes — which is the detail that gives him his shape. He isn't wandering. He is on the road between his post and elsewhere, and you have simply been standing on his route.

The Kyoto tale is the cruellest thing in the collection

A woman hears it coming and peeks out of her window as it passes.

And it snarls at her:

> Instead of looking at me, have a look at your own child.

She turns.

Inside, the infant's legs have been torn away.

And the lesson is the oldest one there is

The taboo against looking.

But notice the refinement, because it's worse than the usual form.

Everywhere else in this tradition, looking costs you — the sea-princess leaves, the crane wife goes, the icicle melts, you fall over backwards, you are taken.

Here, looking costs somebody else.

She spent one second at the window and it was taken out of her child, in the next room, while she was doing it.

That's the don't-look rule at its most punitive: the price is not paid by the person who broke it.

He has a matching pair

There's a second burning wheel: the katawaguruma, documented in 1677, with Sekien drawing her in the same 1779 volume.

Same fire. Same wheel. But bearing an anguished woman rather than a monk's head.

The scholarly assessment is that these are likely divergent interpretations of the same underlying folklore — one wheel, split in two by the telling.

Male and female wheels, one fire, printed side by side.

And their registers differ completely. His is hell's infrastructure — an official, on a route, punishing a tyrant. Hers is street-level grief: a woman in agony, in public, with a child involved, and no cosmology behind it at all.

The same burning thing, seen once from above and once from the road.