Koto-furunushi: The Koto That Remembers a Forgotten Music

What is Koto-furunushi?

The koto is a long zither with thirteen strings, laid on the floor and played with picks worn on the fingers. Furu is old. Nushi is a master, an owner, or the spirit that has made its home in something. Koto-furunushi is the old master of the koto — or the koto that has become old enough to have a spirit of its own.

It appears in Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro, the last of Toriyama Sekien’s four illustrated yokai collections, first published in 1784. That book is given over almost entirely to household objects and instruments turned into creatures, and Koto-furunushi shares its volume with Biwa-bokuboku, a walking lute. The pairing is old: in the medieval picture scrolls Sekien drew on, a koto creature and a biwa creature travel together.

The plate

The koto’s end, where the strings are tied off, has become a face. The finger picks stand up from it like horns or ears. The strings, loosened and snapped, rise in a tangle that reads as a head of wild hair. The body is cracked and holed. Under one foreleg lies a torn book of music.

Look for the kotoji, the movable bridges that hold each string up and set its pitch, and there are none. Without them a koto cannot be tuned at all.

The caption

Sekien’s text is short and specific. Since a blind musician called Yatsuhashi changed the way the instrument was tuned and played, he says, the Tsukushi koto has remained in name only, and people who know its sound have become rare. So, perhaps, it took this shape to make its grudge known.

Yatsuhashi Kengyō was a real musician of the seventeenth century, a blind master who trained in Tsukushi-goto — a style of koto music handed down in temples of northern Kyushu — and then built a new repertoire and new tunings of his own. His style spread, carried the old name with it, and became the koto music most people knew. The older tradition did not vanish entirely, but by Sekien’s day it was the music of a few specialists.

Which side the caption is on is not clear. It can be read as sympathy for a venerable tradition pushed aside, or as a joke about the old style’s complaints. Either way, the thing with the grudge is not a neglected instrument. It is a way of playing.

Behavior and abilities

• It makes its grudge known. That is the only purpose the caption gives it.
• It holds a sound nobody hears. The caption’s complaint is that few people can recognise the old music any more.

There is no attack and no victim. Nothing is done to anyone.

Weaknesses and countermeasures

None are recorded. If there is a remedy implied, it is the obvious one — listening — but Sekien does not say so.

Documented plate and later imagery

Documented plate. Toriyama Sekien, Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro, 1784: a battered koto with a face at one end, picks like horns, loose strings like hair, and no bridges, standing on a torn music book. The caption attributes its appearance to the grudge of the old Tsukushi koto, whose sound became rare after Yatsuhashi changed the music.

Later imagery. Modern yokai books usually present Koto-furunushi as a tsukumogami, a household object that comes to life after long neglect: an old koto left unplayed, resentful at being forgotten in a storeroom.

Sekien’s version is more particular and stranger. The instrument is not lonely. The music is. A melody that no living player knows has climbed into the wood and strings, and it is waiting to be recognised.