A koto left in a corner does not scream when it is forgotten. In Toriyama Sekien's print, it grows a face instead — a wooden zither warped into a fixed, staring expression, its own style of music slipped out of living memory. This is Koto-furunushi (琴古主), and its grievance is unusually specific: it isn't mourning neglect in the abstract, it's mourning the fact that almost nobody in Edo could still say what its music actually sounded like.
What does it look like?
Sekien draws the instrument itself as the monster, with no human body grafted on. A pair of eyes and a mouth have opened up on the wooden soundboard of an old koto, and its strings, once carefully tuned, now splay outward in every direction like matted, uncombed hair. It has the look of something that used to be handled with care and has since been left to warp — an object still recognizably a koto, just wrong in a way that catches the eye before the mind places why.
A style that became a name only
Sekien's own caption explains exactly what this particular koto is grieving, and it is more precise than ordinary neglect. The instrument is a Tsukushi-goto (筑紫箏), tied to a specific school of koto performance rather than the instrument in general. Sekien writes that since Yatsuhashi, a blind musician, reworked the music, Tsukushi-goto has become na nomi — "a name only." Few people can still recognize its sound. The yokai's monstrous face is the resentment of a whole musical tradition, not just one abandoned object.
Tsukushi-goto was real. Its growth is credited to Kenjun, a sixteenth-century monk said to have served at Zendō-ji temple in Kurume. Kurume lies in old Chikugo province on Kyushu — "Tsukushi" being the old name for that part of the island. The music grew out of court music played in temples. Tradition says Kenjun also learned from a Chinese musician, though historians find this hard to confirm. It should have been the foundation of koto music as Japan came to know it. Instead, Yatsuhashi Kengyō learned it from Hōsui, said to be Kenjun's pupil. Yatsuhashi used new tunings and shaped the koto music still taught today. The parent style survived only in a small circle, mainly around the Saga domain. By Sekien's time, two centuries later, Tsukushi-goto was a footnote to its own successor.
An older pairing, revived
Sekien did not invent the idea of a koto-spirit from nothing. His preface says the book began after he viewed the Hyakki Yagyo Emaki, a Muromachi-period picture scroll of parading yokai. In that scroll, a koto-spirit is already being pulled along by a biwa-spirit. Scholars think Sekien revived that pairing. Koto-furunushi and Biwa-bokuboku, the lute-spirit, share the same two-page spread. Biwa-bokuboku's name plays on Bokuba, a famous lute of old. Koto-furunushi mourns something more like an extinction: a whole way of playing that nearly nobody could still recognize by ear.
Where it comes from
Koto-furunushi appears in Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro (百器徒然袋, 1784), the fourth and final volume of Toriyama Sekien's yokai print tetralogy, in its second of three sections (jo, chu, ge). The book's title is itself a small joke: "hyakki," normally written with characters meaning "hundred demons," is instead written with characters meaning "hundred vessels," signaling from the cover page that this volume is devoted almost entirely to tsukumogami, the animate objects, rather than to gods or ghosts. Many of its entries borrow figures from the old Hyakki Yagyō scrolls. Sekien then built names and jokes around them from classics like Tsurezuregusa. Koto-furunushi is one of these.
See the original print
Toriyama Sekien drew Koto-furunushi in Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro (1784). This book has that picture, with its caption in English.
- Japandemonium Illustrated: The Yokai Encyclopedias of Toriyama Sekien →trans. Hiroko Yoda & Matt AltThe complete Edo-period bestiaries that so many of these entries trace back to, in full English translation.
- The Book of Yokai →Michael Dylan FosterThe most readable scholarly introduction to yokai — where they come from, what they mean, and the major creatures.
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Koto-furunushi since Sekien
Unlike Sekien's more famous inventions, Koto-furunushi never developed an independent life outside yokai reference books and print collections — there is no local shrine, no folk custom, no cucumber-offering ritual attached to it the way there is for the kappa. It survives mostly as a matched pair with Biwa-bokuboku, the two musical tsukumogami reprinted together in modern yokai encyclopedias much as they first appeared on Sekien's page. What keeps it interesting is less the monster than the history it accidentally preserved: a two-hundred-year-old joke about a koto style so thoroughly eclipsed by its own descendant that, by the time anyone thought to draw its ghost, most readers would have needed the caption to know it had ever existed at all.
