The Dorotabō: The Muddy Ghost Who Cries for His Stolen Field
Toriyama Sekien, the great eighteenth-century cataloguer of Japan's spirits, drew him once, and the image has never needed revising: out of the black mud of a rice paddy, under a broken moon, rises the upper half of a man — one-eyed, hairy, dripping, mouth open in a cry — with three fingers on each groping hand. He is the dorotabō : the "muddy rice-field old man," and unlike nearly every other creature in the crowded night-parade of Japanese folklore, everyone always knew exactly who he was, because he told them. Night after night, from the flooded field on the edge of the village, the voice comes up out of the mud, hoarse and grieving and unappeasable, crying the one sentence the dorotabō has ever been heard to say: "Ta wo kaese!" — "Give me back my field!" His story, as the Edo-period tellers and Sekien's own caption frame it, is the shortest tragedy in the yokai canon. There was an old farmer once who had bad land and no help, and who spent h...