Dodomeki (Yamagata)

Dodomeki is a woman-oni in which a hundred coin-shaped eyes line her elongated arms. The figure is told in the karmic register, a woman of a habit of theft punished by the eyes of stolen coins growing on her arms and turning her to an oni. Also written "Hyakume-ki," the figure embodies the early-modern satirical conjoining of coin and eye. Toriyama Sekien's Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki (1779) figures the yokai with coin-shaped eyes lined down her arms; the inscription gives the karmic legend that a woman of habitual theft has the coin-spirit eyes appear on her body. The source-current reaches into Kamakura-Muromachi setsuwa; a separate strand transmits the Hyakume-ki tradition of Utsunomiya in Tochigi, where Fujiwara-no-Hidesato is said to have struck down a hundred-eyed oni, providing the place-name of the Hyakume-ki-dori in Utsunomiya, Tochigi. The Sekien figural lineage is separate from this. Toriyama Sekien's Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki (1779) is the principal early text. The Utsunomiya Hyakume-ki tradition is a Heian-period regional tradition of Fujiwara-no-Hidesato's subjugation, providing the origin of the place-name Hyakume-ki-dori in Hanawada, Utsunomiya. Murakami Kenji's Nihon Yokai Daijiten (Kadokawa, 2005) and the Nichibunken Strange Phenomena and Yokai Folklore Database systematize both lineages. Adjacent many-eye yokai include moku-moku-ren and hyakume; the Tochigi Hyakume-ki tradition (the Fujiwara-no-Hidesato subjugation) connects to the Utsunomiya Futaarayama-jinja engi, while the Yamagata-Tohoku "Dodomeki" carries the Sekien karmic-theft lineage. In lineage with the Kanawa and Hashihime karmic-female-oni traditions, the figure stands within the early-modern female-oni cycle of female business and jealousy.