Mukade is written 百足 — a hundred legs. The characters are a count, and the count is wrong in the direction that matters: the animal has fewer than a hundred and more than anyone wants to see.
Japan has a real one. The ōmukade is large, fast, armoured in segments, and venomous enough to be a genuine medical problem. It lives under stones and in roof cavities and comes indoors.
That is the first thing to say about this yōkai, because it separates the centipede from most of the company it keeps in English catalogues. A fox-spirit is an idea about a fox. A mukade is a specific insect that was already in the house.
The folk material starts from a property of the animal rather than from a story.
A Japanese dictionary of folklore records, from the Tanabe area in Kii, the complaint behind the belief: kill a centipede and another comes out afterwards from the same place. The problem being addressed is not one centipede. It is the fact that where there is one there are more, and that killing the one you can see accomplishes nothing.
The remedy recorded there is a gesture. You face the direction the centipede came out from, and you draw the shape of two interlocking rings in the air, three times, and then they do not come.
I like this as a specimen of how a charm gets built. It is addressed to the right problem — recurrence, not the individual animal — and it is performed toward a direction rather than at a creature. There is nothing to confront. There is only a place that keeps producing them.
The centipede’s other career is at the opposite end of the scale, and it comes from a medieval popular tale about the warrior Tawara Tōda.
The telling that survives in printed form sets up a geography before it sets up a plot. A woman meets the warrior and explains who she is: she lives in the lake of Ōmi, and has done since the land first hardened out of the waters, through seven ages in which the lake itself became mulberry fields. She has never shown her shape to a human.
Then she gives the history of her trouble. In the reign of an eighth-century sovereign, a deity came down to the peak of Mikami beside the lake. And from that time on, she says, a thing called a mukade appeared on that mountain, and for long years has devoured her kind and the fish of the rivers.
So the arrangement is: a dragon in the water, a centipede on the mountain, and a human recruited as a third party. She had lain across the bridge at Seta watching the people who passed, and none would come near her, and the warrior is the first who did.
The centipede in that tale is not vermin made large. It is the resident power of a mountain, and it is eating the resident power of a lake.
The two sizes are the interesting thing about this creature, and they are not a contradiction.
A segmented animal has no natural maximum. A fox is fox-sized; a snake is long but you can see where it ends. A centipede is a repeating unit, and a repeating unit can be imagined continuing indefinitely — which is why the descriptions that attach to the great one are always about how many times it goes around something rather than how tall it is.
That also explains the venom’s place in the stories. The thing that makes the small animal dangerous is not its size, and the thing that makes the large one dangerous is not its teeth. In both cases the danger is distributed along the length, and in both cases the question is how much of it there is.
Our note on the tsuchigumo deals with the other many-legged enemy of the old military tales. The difference is instructive: the spider is given a lair and a surprise, and the centipede is given a mountain and an appetite.
The domestic end of the belief deserves one more paragraph, because it is the part that explains why this creature has a hold at all.
Almost everything else on this site has to be met somewhere. You go out at night, or you cross water, or you visit a place. The records about foxes and ghosts and lights are about thresholds, and the standard advice is about not crossing them.
The centipede does not require you to go anywhere. It is already inside the roof space, and it comes down. The only threshold involved is the ceiling, and it is not one you can decline to cross.
That is why the remedy in the dictionary is aimed at a direction and not at an encounter. There is no encounter to prepare for and no journey to avoid — only a point in the house where they come from, which you can gesture at and hope.
One detail of the Tawara Tōda material is worth keeping because it tells you what kind of story it is.
Before any of this, the warrior’s father hands him the family’s sword — a blade said to have come down from the Fujiwara ancestor, given over because the old man can no longer carry it and the son is judged fit to continue the house’s reputation.
That is the vocabulary of lineage, not of monster-hunting. The centipede episode sits inside a work that also carries the severed head of Taira no Masakado and a visit to the dragon palace under the sea, and our notes on Masakado’s head and on Urashima deal with those two separately.
Which places the mukade in a particular kind of company: the great centipede is an item in a warrior’s curriculum vitae. It is there to be the thing he was equal to.
A caution on the text. The copy consulted here is a machine-read transcription that carries its own warning against being treated as an edition, so nothing above is quoted verbatim and no wording is relied on.
Set the two ends side by side and the word is doing a great deal of work with very little.
At the small end it names an animal with a count in its name, which comes back after you kill it, and which is dealt with by a gesture made toward a direction.
At the large end it names something that occupied a mountain by the largest lake in the country and had to be removed by a man with an inherited sword.
Nothing in between is specified. There is no middling centipede in this material, no awkward medium-sized one — and that gap is where the fear sits. You know what the small one is, you have heard what the large one was, and you do not know which one is in the roof.
People set down that they had met this, or watched it, or had it in the house. Those records exist in some number; they are short, they give a place and sometimes a year, and they are not interested in who the person was.
Five of them became the five stories in There Is No Column For It. The book is at /books/there-is-no-column-for-it/.
The readings in “Why the Scale Keeps Changing” and “What the Name Does” are KWAIDANOTE’s own.
Found an error? Write to kwaidanote@gmail.com — corrections are made on this page and dated.