Tōfu-kozō (豆腐小僧): The Shy Little Yokai Who Carries Tofu

What is Tōfu-kozō?

It is dusk, and raining, on a street in Edo, and a small boy is standing in the wet under a hat far too big for him. His head is too big as well. In both hands he holds a round tray, and on the tray is a block of fresh tofu with a red maple leaf pressed into the top of it. He follows you a little way down the street. He does nothing else.

That is the tōfu-kozō, and he comes out of books rather than out of the dark. His earliest known appearance is the Bakemono Shinai Hyōbanki of 1779, a comic kibyōshi — one of the cheap illustrated satirical booklets that Edo read for fun — and he turns up again and again in the kibyōshi of the following decades, usually as the butt of the joke.

What does tōfu-kozō mean?

The name is written 豆腐小僧: tōfu, bean curd, and kozō, a young boy — an apprentice, an errand boy, a temple novice. The tofu boy. It is pronounced TOH-foo KOH-zoh. In Kitao Masayoshi’s Bakemono Chakutōchō of 1788 a very similar figure is labelled simply “big-headed boy,” and he was sometimes confused with the one-eyed boy, the hitotsume-kozō. The name settled with the tofu.

Appearance

A child of about five, a very large head under a very large hat, a tray, and tofu with a maple-leaf stamp. He stands in the rain at dusk, holding his tofu and doing little else. Our illustration follows that scene and gives him two eyes, to keep him apart from the one-eyed boy. The big head is a drawing convention of the comic books, and nothing more.

Behavior and abilities

• He follows you. At a distance, on the road, at dusk.
• He carries tofu. Carefully.
• He is easily scared. In at least one book, by you.

A timid yokai

The tōfu-kozō’s defining quality is that he is not frightening. He is weak and comic: bullied by the other yokai in one book; in Santō Kyōden’s Bakemono Tsurezuregusa, running away from a human and dropping his precious tofu in the road; and in a picture book about yokai who give up haunting and take honest jobs, settling down as a tofu seller. He belongs with the karakasa-kozō and the chōchin-obake among the small comic monsters that Edo drew to be laughed at.

Weaknesses and countermeasures

None are needed. If anything, the human is the danger in his stories.

Documented figure and later imagery

Documented figure. Comic picture books from 1779 on: a big-headed child in a large hat carrying maple-stamped tofu, who follows people, does no harm, and in one Kyōden book drops his tofu fleeing a human.

Later imagery. Some modern books give the tōfu-kozō a darker side — tofu that grows mould on anyone who eats it, or a sinister errand on behalf of greater monsters. Those are not in the Edo descriptions. He may be the gentlest yokai on the shelf: a small boy in the rain, trying not to drop his tofu, more frightened of you than you could ever be of him.