Tokoyo and the Sea Monster

***Fables and Folktales: Tokoyo and the Sea Monster*** is the seventy-ninth episode of the *Miscellaneous Myths* series and the fourth episode of the *Fables and Folktales* series by Red. In it, she narrates the story of Tokoyo, a eighteen-year-old girl who kills Yofuné-Nushi while attempting to find her father in exile.

## Introduction

Red begins by explaining how she, like many others, has a liking towards and a desire to visit Japan. She states that many in the West have this desire often from enjoyment and exposure to various anime and other Japanese media.

According to Red, this makes sense; as enjoyment of a story will naturally make one curious about the culture or environment that story comes from. Cultural exchange has been a very efficient way of sharing stories between otherwise isolated cultures that facets and develops interest in each other's stories. Knowing a culture's stories is not the same as understanding said culture, though it can act as a gateway to allowing oneself to become interested and immersed in other cultural aspects; the same can be said in reverse.

It has been a favorite pastime of globetrotters to write down a myriad of local stories from the places they visit. In the early 1900s, Brit, Richard Gordon Smith, spent the later years of his life travelling as far east as he could, which landed him in Japan. he settled down in Japan, collecting stories and folktales he heard while on his travels. Eventually, compiling them all into an anthology called *Ancient Tales & Folklore of Japan*, which contains the main story of the video. In fact, it is the *only* source we know of that contains the story.

## Summary

Hojo Takatoki, last regent of the Kamakura shogunate, exiles Oribe Shima, a samurai, to the Oki islands for an unspecified crime. The banishment separates Oribe Shima from his daughter, Tokoyo, who is unhappy with the arrangement and seeks to save her father no matter what. She sells her belongings, goes to port, tries and fails to charter a boat, then eventually just takes one instead.

Tokoyo makes it to the Oki islands, but has no luck finding her father, however. Nobody seems to know where he is, and if they did know, helping him out would be against the law and would have serious consequences. Eventually, Tokoyo runs herself ragged after trying for some time to find her father, and is considerably exhausted.

One night, Tokoyo fires off a quick prayer at a shrine and falls asleep, but is awoken by the sound of a child. At the water's edge, a praying priest is holding up a little girl whom the priest almost pushes into the water. Before he could, Tokoyo rushes-in to save the girl. The priest attempts to explain that there is a giant sea monster beneath the waves that the people must sacrifice a girl to annually, lest they be inundated with terrible storms.

Fed up with her current situation, Tokoyo figures that there's nothing left to lose, and so offers to go under the water and kill the monster. She gives the priest a letter for her father, sticks a knife between her teeth, and dives in. Tokoyo makes it underneath with little difficulty, as she spent much of her younger years as a pearl-diver with the locals in her hometown.

Finding a luminous cave, Tokoyo goes inside it to find a silhouette of a man. Upon closer inspection, the cave doesn't contain the Sea Monster, but rather a wooden statue of Hojo Takatoki, the man who exiled her father. Initially bent on taking out some of her anger on the statue, Tokoyo decides to instead save it by tying it around her.

At that moment is when Yofuné-Nushi shows up. Lugging around a heavy statue and at the bottom of the ocean, Tokoyo looks like easy prey. This was the Monster's first and last mistake, as Tokoyo nails it in the eye and stabs it in the heart, killing it. Tokoyo then emerges out of the ocean, carrying both the statue and the corpse of the Sea Monster. Tokoyo is hailed as a hero by the locals after ruling out the possibility of her being a god or anime protagonist.

Word of Tokoyo's bravery and gains makes its way to Hojo Takatoki himself, who happened to awake from a longstanding illness the exact moment Tokoyo pulled his statue out of the water. This leads Hojo Takatoki to believe that Tokoyo accidentally saved him from a curse the statue had put on him that would have led to a slow and painful death.

In gratitude, Hojo Takatoki immediately orders her father to be released from prison and exile, and Tokoyo reunites with her dad. The two live in their home, safe and secure int he knowledge that Tokoyo is "a stone-cold, monster-slayin' badass with lungs of titanium." As well as this, it is most likely that Beowulf is sitting in the corner taking notes.

## Credits

In the credits, Red sings *Holding Out for a Hero* by Bonnie Tyler.

## Characters appearing

* Tokoyo
* Hojo Takatoki
* Oribe Shima
* Yofuné-Nushi
* Beowulf (cameo)

## Links

Watch *Tokoyo and the Sea Monster* on YouTube