A house has fallen to ruin. Its shoji, the paper sliding screens, are still in place. And all over them, eyes have opened. Not one or two. Countless eyes. This is mokumokuren.
The name is written 目目連. 目 (moku) means "eye," and it is written twice. 連 (ren) means "in a row" or "linked together." Eyes, eyes, all in a row.
What does Mokumokuren look like?
Countless eyes appear on the shoji of a house. That is the whole picture.
The artist Toriyama Sekien drew it in Konjaku Hyakki Shūi (1781). It sits in the book's lower volume, titled Ame ("Rain"). His print shows a ruined, run-down house. Its shoji are covered with eyes.
The go player's obsession
Sekien wrote a short caption beside the picture. It gives a cause, and the cause is a game.
A go player had a deep obsession with the game. That obsession poured into his go board. Then it spread through the whole house and appeared everywhere. The eyes are what it became.
The eyes in Tsugaru
A tale from Tsugaru, in the far north of Honshu, tells of eyes on shoji too. Yamada Norio wrote it down as "Shōji no me" (Eyes on the Shoji). It appears in his book Tōhoku Kaidan no Tabi (1974).
A merchant from Edo came to Tsugaru to buy timber. He wanted to save the cost of an inn. So he slept in an empty house. In the night, countless eyes appeared on the shoji. He was not afraid. He gathered the eyes up and took them home. Then he sold them to an eye doctor.
Yamada's original never uses the name mokumokuren. It was Tada Katsumi who gave the Tsugaru yokai that name. He did so in Gensō Sekai no Jūnin-tachi IV (1990).
The samurai of Nanbu
A darker story comes from the Nanbu domain, also in Tōhoku. Mizuki Shigeru's yokai encyclopedia treats it as a kind of mokumokuren.
A Nanbu samurai lay in bed. He found an eyeball at his feet. The eyeball gave birth to another eye. That one gave birth to another, and then another. Soon eyes filled the room. Next morning, the samurai's own eyes were gone.
Where it comes from
The yokai researcher Murakami Kenji points out that mokumokuren is Sekien's own creation. It did not come down from a village legend.
The name is said to be linked to Ichimokuren, a one-eyed god. How close that link is, the sources do not say.
The caption suggests one more reading. A go board is a grid of lines. A shoji is a grid of wooden lattice and paper squares. A player who stared at one grid for years may, in Sekien's telling, have filled the other with eyes. That is a reading, not something the caption says.
See the original print
Toriyama Sekien drew Mokumokuren in Konjaku Hyakki Shūi (1781). 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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Mokumokuren today
Mizuki Shigeru's family has a story of its own. His second daughter, Etsuko, went on a junior-high school trip to Kyoto. At the inn, she and her classmates watched eye-like things on a shoji lattice. The eyes floated up and moved. Mizuki said it was mokumokuren.
A TV show later tested the idea. On Nippon TV's Tokoro-san no Me ga Ten!, people looked into a box at a shoji-pattern picture. Every one of them said they saw eyes, or glowing eyes. The cause is an optical effect called the Bergen illusion. People in the past may have seen moonlit shoji the same way.
