Shirime Legend

The Shirime legend is a Kyoto yokai cycle in which a traveller on a night road is stopped by a man who asks, 'Wait a moment,' then lifts his robe to reveal a single large eye in the centre of his buttocks. The figure does no harm; he merely shows the eye and walks away. Built as a two-part anticipation-and-letdown structure, shirime belongs to the deflationary register of early-modern yokai rather than the terrifying. The figure was popularised in literate circles by the haiku poet Yosa Buson, who depicted him in the Buson Yokai Emaki (c. 1776), and shares the 'misplaced eye' motif with the te-no-me of Amidagamine. The central setting is Higashiyama in Kyoto, including the slopes around Amidagamine, Kiyomizu-dera and Tofuku-ji. Buson's scroll, the contemporary picture-scroll work of Toriyama Sekien, and the haikai and kyoka networks of Kyoto provide the principal documentation; further references appear in the folklore volume of the Kyoto prefectural history.