Tenjō-sagari: The Old Woman Who Comes Down From the Ceiling

What is Tenjō-sagari?

Tenjō is the ceiling. Sagari is hanging down, or coming down. Tenjō-sagari — also read tenjō-kudari — is the thing that comes down from the ceiling.

In 1779 Toriyama Sekien included it in Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki, the sequel to his first catalogue of yokai. The plate shows an old woman with wild, disordered hair hanging head-down from the rafters of a house, her hair spilling into the room below.

Unlike many of Sekien’s earlier entries, this one has a caption. It is not an explanation. It is a joke, and it takes two steps to get.

The joke in the caption

The first step is a story. Sekien’s readers knew the tale of Ibaraki-dōji, a demon whose arm had been cut off by the warrior Watanabe no Tsuna. To get the arm back, Ibaraki-dōji disguised itself as Tsuna’s aunt, came into the house, seized the arm, and escaped by breaking out through the gable of the roof.

Sekien’s caption recalls this and then turns it over. That demon came in looking like a respectable woman and went up through the roof. This one is no beauty, and she comes down from the ceiling.

The second step is a phrase. In Edo-period Japanese, tenjō o miseru — “to show someone the ceiling” — meant to knock them flat, to put them through something dreadful. Sekien wonders aloud whether the saying comes from an encounter like this one. If you are lying on your back looking at the ceiling, something has already gone very wrong.

Appearance

An old woman, upside down, hanging from the beams, hair falling loose toward the floor. That is the whole of the figure.

Our illustration sets her in an old farmhouse at night, where the beams are high enough to hide something, and lets her hang in the dark above a single lantern.

Behavior and abilities

• She comes down from the ceiling. It is the name and the image.
• She is old and not beautiful. The caption makes a point of it, as the punchline to the Ibaraki-dōji story.
• She puts people on their backs. Or so the pun suggests; the caption poses it as a question.

Weaknesses and countermeasures

None are recorded. The caption does not say what she does once she is down, whether she lives in a particular kind of house, or how to keep her away. It ends on the pun.

Documented plate and later imagery

Documented plate. Toriyama Sekien, Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki, 1779: an old woman with loose hair hanging from a ceiling, with a caption contrasting her with Ibaraki-dōji’s escape through a roof and playing on the phrase tenjō o miseru.

Later imagery. Modern yokai books give Tenjō-sagari a habitat and habits — a creature of old, dark houses with neglected attics, dropping down to startle the people below and then retreating. None of this is in Sekien’s text, which is concerned with a demon story and a figure of speech.

The plate, left to itself, is enough. Some night the dust overhead will shift. Before you look up, it is worth remembering what the phrase meant.