An iconographic reading of the Dōjōji bell as depicted in Toriyama Sekien’s Konjaku Hyakki Shūi. While a note alludes to a variant in which the woman, transformed into a serpent, coils around the bell hiding Anchin and heats it until it melts into scalding liquid, hearsay also holds that the bell itself survived in historical record. Its “yokai nature” here is less an ensouled object than a visualization of folk belief in obsession possessing a vessel and causing anomalies. It represents Edo-period reception where Noh, sekkyō, and engi traditions intermingle.
Character Profile
This section is our own creative profile for storytelling. It is not historical fact or scholarship.
Yokai Type - Traditional Yokai
Category - Household and object yokai
Rarity - Rare
Personality - taciturn, emblem of lingering obsession
Compatibility - turns dire when bound to grudges, dangerous when linked to obsessive attachment
Abilities - conduit of obsession (receives passions and triggers anomalies), incandescence (the bell grows searing hot in certain tellings), place of concealment (functions as a vessel that hides a person within)
Weaknesses - quenching by water (in engi-line variants), pacification through Buddhist rites and sutra chanting
Habitat - Kii Province, Dōjōji Temple, later transmissions in Kyoto-area temples and other custodial sites
🔮Yokai Compatibility Test
For more detailed information and diagnosis results about Sekien Zue – The Dōjōji Bell, please click here.