Dōdōmeki (百々目鬼)

In his *Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki*, the artist Toriyama Sekien (鳥山石燕) set down the image of a woman — both arms dense with countless eyes that grow from the skin like scales, each one gazing back at you in perfect silence. Every eye, so the legend holds, is the spirit of a copper coin she once stole: a *toriме*, a "bird's eye," born from the round hole at the center of the coin.

*Torime* was simply another word for money. The copper coin's central perforation resembled the eye of a bird, and so the name took hold. A woman with a weakness for theft stole again and again until the coins fused to the flesh of her arms, and the coins became eyes. Sekien cited as his source a rare and curious volume called the *Kankan Gaishi* — yet not one person has ever confirmed that this book exists.

Beside the title *Kankan* he inscribed a gloss reading *hakonekara saki* — "beyond the Hakone barrier," the place where Edo's reach did not extend, where such things might happen unremarked. Scholars note with easy candor that Sekien may well have invented both the source and the story together. That a yokai's provenance should itself be yokai-like may have been, in the end, a deliberate game.

*Dōdōki*, *Dōdōmeki*, *Dōdōnuki* — place names written with those characters and read as *dōdōmeki* still scatter across Japan to this day. A place name, a slang word for coins, a woman with eyes growing from her arms: Sekien drew a single line through all three and summoned onto paper a creature that had never existed before.

Since the Shōwa era, yokai encyclopedias have often called her *Tōdōmeki*, and the reading that her arm-eyes are transformed stolen coins has spread widely. Rumor feeds on rumor, and the fabricated specter goes on shifting its shape by degrees, lurking still in the corners of bookshelves today.