This version looks closely at how the medochi, though merely “a dialect name for the kappa,” carries a face all its own, belonging to the land of Tsugaru.

Begin with the name. Medochi derives from mizuchi (蛟), which once meant a water-serpent deity[1]. How it came to be the name of the kappa traces a larger current in waterside belief — a water-god declining over the ages, descending step by step from a revered deity into a dreaded yokai. The name medochi carries that memory of decline down to the present day.

In its image, too, the Tsugaru medochi stands apart. Where the Edo artists drew the kappa with a beak and a shell, the people of Tsugaru told of a monkey face and a black body[5]. Around Towada they say the medotsu has a red face; color and form waver from place to place. All that holds constant is the stature of a child, and that eerie pull toward the water.

What must not be overlooked in matters of belief is its two-sidedness with Suiko-sama. In Tsugaru, the medochi that drags people under (the demon) and the Suiko-sama that quells it (the water-god) are often spoken of as two faces of one same being[4]. In 1934 Orikuchi Shinobu saw with his own eyes the Suiko image at Nagata, had a copy made of it, and held a river festival at Kokugakuin. The figure of “one Suiko-sama for forty-eight” has no scholarly grounding, yet the sense of rank — the medochi governed by a “chief” — is truly rooted in the water-god belief of Tsugaru.

Its weaknesses, and the means of quelling it, all come back to its bond with the river. It dissolves at the touch of a hemp stalk; offer the first cucumber of the season and it takes no one; enshrine Suiko-sama and the deep pool grows calm. The people of Tsugaru lived by the water and feared it too — and the medochi, this kappa, is something like the knot they tied of those days in their hearts.