Amikiri

What it is

Amikiri is a yōkai, one of the strange beings of Japanese legend and picture-book art. The name means net cutter. It is known from a single early picture, an entry in the Gazu Hyakki Yagyō, a book of yōkai images by the artist Toriyama Sekien published in 1776. The drawing shows a scorpion-like creature, or a blend of serpent, bird and lobster, with pincer claws like a crab's. Sekien supplied no explanatory text, so what the creature was meant to be is uncertain. Writers from the Shōwa period onward describe it as a being that snips mosquito nets, sudare blinds, and nets left out to dry.

Where it comes from

The amikiri first appears in the Gazu Hyakki Yagyō of 1776. Toriyama Sekien (1712–1788), who drew it, is known to have borrowed heavily from an earlier emaki, a painted handscroll: the Hyakkai zukan of Sawaki Sūshi (1707–1772), dated 1737. That scroll includes a similar creature called kamikiri, the hair cutter, which Sekien left out of his own series, and the amikiri may be an offshoot of it. Another reading is that the creature has no older folk tradition behind it at all, and is simply Sekien's invention, perhaps built on a play on words or on some allegory his readers would have recognised at once. The yōkai researcher Katsumi Tada hypothesized just such a pun.

What people believe

The one story attached to the amikiri comes from Norio Yamada's Tōhoku Kaidan no Tabi, a 1974 book of ghost stories gathered on a journey through the Tōhoku region. It is set in the Shōnai area of Yamagata Prefecture, at a fishing village whose nets kept being cut into pieces, damage blamed on the amikiri. One villager brought his nets home early and hid indoors to stay out of trouble, yet his mosquito nets were shredded all the same, and the people inside were bitten all over by mosquitos. Its mischief, in this account, is the cutting itself, and the mosquito bites follow from it.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Sekien gave his creature no caption, so yōkai researchers treat its identity as an open question. Katsumi Tada hypothesized that Sekien invented it around a double meaning: in Japanese, ami can mean a net, and it can also mean mysid shrimp, a small shrimp-like creature. Kenji Murakami went looking for the Shōnai tale in other sources from Yamagata Prefecture and found none, concluding that Yamada made the story up himself. The wider conclusion drawn by researchers is that there may be no authentic folk tradition behind the amikiri, and that the creature may owe its existence to a picture-book artist's wordplay rather than to village belief.

Compare and confuse

The nearest relative is the kamikiri, the hair cutter, a yōkai that appears in Sawaki Sūshi's Hyakkai zukan of 1737 but is missing from Sekien's series. The two names share one shape, net cutter and hair cutter, and the amikiri may be a variant of the older creature rather than an independent one.

Questions people ask about Amikiri

Good reading and sources

• Amikiri on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data