Wanyūdō (輪入道): The Burning Wheel With a Human Face

What is Wanyūdō?

Late at night, down an empty street, comes a single wheel. Not a cart — one wheel, the kind that carried an ox-cart, taller than a man, turning on its own with no axle and no ox. It is burning. And where the hub should be there is a face: a grown man’s, heavy-browed, bearded, glaring at whoever is unlucky enough to be looking.

That is the plate Toriyama Sekien published in 1779 in Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki, the sequel to his first collection of yokai, and his caption gives it the detail that turns a strange picture into a dangerous one. Whoever sees the wheel loses their soul. The danger is not being run down. The danger is looking.

What does wanyūdō mean?

The name is written 輪入道. Wa is a wheel. Nyūdō means “one who has entered the Way” — a man who has taken Buddhist vows, often late in life, and shaved his head — and in yokai names it had come to mean any big-headed, monkish apparition, like the Mikoshi-nyūdō that grows taller as you look up at it. Wanyūdō is the wheel-monk: a wheel with a monk’s head where the hub should be.

Sekien’s face, though, is not a shaven one. It has a full beard and mustache.

Appearance

One wooden wheel. Not a burning cart, and not a wheeled monster with limbs. At the hub, a man’s face with deep creases and a fixed stare; around the rim, flame and smoke like a moving halo.

Our illustration keeps Sekien’s economy: charred wood, iron fittings, real rolling weight, and fire that clings to the wheel rather than filling the street. Many later pictures give the face a shaven head; we keep the beard of the 1779 plate.

Behavior and abilities

• It patrols alone. The single wheel moves through the night streets by itself.
• Seeing it costs the soul. The sight is the attack.

That is the whole of it. The Wanyūdō of the plate does not speak, chase, or burn houses. It rolls, and it is seen, and that is enough.

The sign on the door

Sekien’s caption does something few of his captions do: it tells you what to do. Paste a paper on the entrance of the house with the words 此所勝母の里 — “This is Shōbo village” — and the wheel will keep away from the door.

Shōbo, 勝母, means “conquer mother.” The phrase comes from an old Chinese story about a man of perfect filial piety who, arriving at a village of that name, refused to set foot in it, because he would not even walk through a place whose name insulted a mother. A thing that honours that scruple will not pass a door that claims the name. The paper is a bluff, and the monster is too principled to call it.

Where it came from, and where it was put

Sekien’s caption names no province and no town. The Kyoto that modern summaries attach to the Wanyūdō — a particular street, a particular night — comes from a 1677 collection of ghost stories, Shokoku Hyakumonogatari, in which a wheel apparition appears on Higashinotōin street. Later readers took that tale as the seed of Sekien’s picture. It may have been. But the picture itself is placeless, and the wheel can roll down any street at all.

It is also routinely merged with the Katawa-guruma, another Edo-period wheel apparition, this one with a woman riding a single wheel. They are cousins in the same print culture, and they are not the same creature.

Weaknesses and countermeasures

The paper sign, and nothing else. No sword, no sutra, no salt. Ink on paper, and a sentence that works because the thing on the wheel has a conscience.

Documented plate and later imagery

Documented plate. Toriyama Sekien, Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki, 1779: a single self-rolling cart wheel wrapped in flame, with a bearded man’s face at its hub; seeing it costs the soul; a paper reading “This is Shōbo village” on the door keeps it away. No place is named.

Later imagery. Anime, games, and collectible art have made the Wanyūdō a fire monster — hurling flames, pulling souls from bodies on sight, usually parked in a definite Kyoto, and often fused with the Katawa-guruma.

The plate’s horror is smaller and stranger. A piece of everyday transport, burning, alone, looking at you — and the only thing between it and your door is a scrap of paper with a lie on it.