A Folklore Fact: Azuki Arai — The Spirit Who Washes Beans in the Dark
- Chiaki Kamikawa
- Jun 11
- 3 min read
Azuki Arai (小豆洗い) — the Bean Washer — is not among the dangerous ones. It haunts riversides and mountain streams at night, and what you hear is the sound of beans being washed: a dry, rhythmic scraping, shoki shoki, rising from the water below. Sometimes a voice goes with it, singing to itself: Shall I wash beans? Shall I catch a human? And then — nothing. The yokai is never seen. Only heard.
No one agrees on whether encountering it is bad luck or just strange.
It simply does its work, endlessly, in the dark — washing beans no one will eat, repeating it into the dark. The unease, if there is any, is not in violence. It is in the focus. The sense that somewhere, just out of sight, something is completely absorbed in what it is doing.
The Women Peeling Beans
I first connected this yokai to something I saw in Cyprus.
It is a stereotype now more than a daily reality, but the image exists strongly — an older woman, a giagia, sitting outside or in the kitchen with dried beans in front of her. Peeling with her thumbs, sorting with her fingers, throwing away the bad ones without looking. Hands moving from memory. No hurry.
What stayed with me was not the peeling itself but a thought: what if I saw this scene, assumed it was innocent and everyday — and then the woman turned and looked at me, and her eyes were hollow? Her face flat and unreadable, the same as the woman next to her?
If you know the film Don't Look Now, you know that feeling. You expect one world and suddenly another one is looking back at you. A door opens a little. The ordinary becomes a way in.
That moment is what this painting is about.
Bean Peeler, Bean Selector (豆むき・豆より)
In the classical depiction — Takehara Shunsen's Ehon Hyaku Monogatari (1841), the earliest known illustration of this yokai — Azuki Arai is a small, bald, grotesque old man. That is the tradition. My painting goes somewhere else entirely.
The two figures are not quite human. Their faces are yellow and flat — spirit-faces, yokai-faces. The Bean Peeler (豆むき) wears a floral headscarf and sits bent over the table. The Bean Selector (豆より) leans forward, sorting what the peeler has opened. Between them: a checked tablecloth, a plate of loose beans, pods scattered on the floor. Behind them, the red Cypriot earth, a farmhouse, trees.
The Japanese letters in the painting — 豆むき, 豆より — run down beside each figure. In my work I use kanji and Japanese script the way manga uses sound effects: they carry sound, weight, atmosphere. But they are also a reference to Kotodama — the idea that words hold spirit. So these letters are not just labels. They are spirits too. Viewers do not need to read them to feel that.
The women have become their work. The work is all they are now.
This is one way spirits are made — not only through death, but through repetition. Azuki Arai washes beans by the river because that act, done so many times in the same place, became something alive on its own.
Two Seas
I grew up in Yokohama — a port city, industrial, the sea always there but heavy with that. Living now by the Mediterranean, the light is strong and the water is blue-green. It is still the sea, but with more history, more beauty, more space for stories that are not about industry.
There is no direct comparison. But both places remind me that I have always been drawn to the edge of things — land and water, familiar and strange, the everyday woman peeling beans and the spirit she might already be.
Bean Peeler, Bean Selector holds Cyprus and Japan together without choosing between them. The women are from here. The spirits come from there. The beans on the table belong to both.
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