Bakezōri: The Sandal Monster in a Straw Cloak

What is Bakezōri?

Bake comes from bakeru, to change form. A zōri is a sandal — in older usage the flat woven straw kind, close cousin of the waraji, the tied straw sandal worn for travel. Bakezōri is the sandal that has changed.

Modern yokai books usually give it a simple shape: a worn-out straw sandal with one eye, two arms, and a pair of legs, that runs around the house at night. The picture in the historical record looks nothing like that.

The scroll figure

The International Research Center for Japanese Studies holds a Yōkai Emaki, a scroll of yokai — animals and household objects — parading in a line. Its catalogue entry names no artist. One figure in it is catalogued as a sandal monster, and the catalogue describes it closely.

Its whole body is covered in yellow straw. Its face is a waraji. It sits astride a staff carved with a horse’s head, like a child’s hobby-horse. And from under the hem of the straw, arms and legs like an animal’s are showing.

That description is nearly the entire record. It is a list of what the figure looks like, and it stops.

Appearance

It is less a sandal with a face than a creature wearing one. The yellow straw reads like a mino, the straw raincoat of farmers and travellers, hanging to the ground. Where the face should be, there is a sandal. Below, something with animal limbs is holding the whole costume up.

Our illustration follows the catalogue: the straw cloak, the sandal face, the staff, and a threshold at night.

Behavior and abilities

• It is in a procession. It belongs to a scroll of animals and objects on the move, and that is its only recorded activity.
• It rides. The horse-head staff is the one gesture it makes.

The record gives no song, no chase, no voice, and no reason.

Weaknesses and countermeasures

None are recorded. A figure in a parade has nothing to be defended against.

A separate explanation, collected by the Mizuki Shigeru Memorial Museum, ties a bakezōri to a household in Ise that treated its footwear carelessly, and to a creature going into the storehouse. That is a different tradition with its own logic of neglect and consequence, and it is not the scroll figure.

Documented scroll and later imagery

Documented scroll. A Yōkai Emaki in the Nichibun collection includes a sandal monster covered in yellow straw, with a waraji face, riding a horse-head staff, with animal-like arms and legs beneath its hem. No story is given.

Later imagery. The standard modern bakezōri is a single sandal with one eye and thin limbs, running through the house at night and sometimes singing, a lesson about looking after worn-out things. It is tidy and a little comic, and it is a separate image from the scroll.

The scroll’s version is harder to explain. Something is wearing straw, and wearing a sandal as a face, and riding a toy horse through the dark — and it is not telling anyone why.