付喪神（つくもがみ）
Tsukumogami
A household object that has lived long enough to gain a spirit.
The idea is that a tool used for a hundred years acquires a soul. A Muromachi picture scroll, the Tsukumogami-ki, tells of old utensils thrown out at the year-end cleaning that rise in anger, take on bodies, parade through the capital and rob travellers, until they are converted and become monks. The parade of walking tools in the Hyakki Yagyō scrolls of the same era belongs to the same picture.
Toriyama Sekien’s Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro of 1784 filled a whole book with such things: a lute, a koto, a quilt, a heap of old scrolls, a general made of crockery. The umbrella on one leg and the hopping lantern are later and cheaper, from Edo prints and games rather than from any scroll, and no village ever reported one. The tool yokai are drawn to be laughed at as much as feared.
Related yokai
Karakasa-kozō
唐傘小僧（からかさこぞう）
An 1857 Osaka print shows a kabuki actor playing a one-legged umbrella monster — the clearest history of a yokai known through pictures rather than encounters.
Chōchin-obake
提灯お化け（ちょうちんおばけ）
One of forty-eight monsters on Yoshimori's print Shinban Bakemono-zukushi is a paper lantern with an eye, a mouth, and something coming out of the mouth. That picture is the record — there is no story attached to it.
Bakezōri
化け草履（ばけぞうり）
A yokai scroll in the Nichibun collection shows a sandal monster covered in yellow straw, with a straw sandal for a face, riding a horse-head staff. It is stranger than the one-eyed singing sandal of modern books, and it comes with no story.
Boroboroton
暮露暮露団（ぼろぼろとん）
Sekien's 1784 Boroboroton is a worn, patched futon standing upright with cotton spilling out like hands. His caption gets there through wandering Zen mendicants, an old poetry contest, and one word that means both.
Koto-furunushi
琴古主（ことふるぬし）
Sekien's 1784 Koto-furunushi is an old koto with a face and strings like wild hair. His caption says why it appeared: after Yatsuhashi changed the music, the old Tsukushi koto survived only as a name, and it came to make its grudge known.
Biwa-bokuboku
琵琶牧々（びわぼくぼく）
In 1784 Sekien drew a blind biwa priest with a biwa for a head, feeling his way under a willow. His caption names two legendary court lutes, Genjō and Bokuba, and builds the creature's name out of one of them.
Seto-taishō
瀬戸大将（せとたいしょう）
Sekien's 1784 Seto-taishō is a warrior assembled from sake flasks, plates, bowls, a teapot, and a kettle, carrying a spear tipped with a vase. Its caption is a chain of puns on Cao Cao, Guan Yu, and the names of Japanese pottery.
Kyōrinrin
経凛々（きょうりんりん）
Sekien's 1784 Kyōrinrin is a figure built from sutra scrolls and folded scripture. His caption wonders whether these are the scriptures thrown away by the monk Shubin, whose curse on Kūkai turned back on himself.