Amikiri

The amikiri's earliest known appearance is as an illustration in Toriyama Sekien's Gazu Hyakki Yagyō (1776). Sekien provided no explanatory caption, and later commentators reconstruct its origin as largely visual/iconographic. Researchers note Sekien sometimes borrowed or played on earlier yōkai imagery (for example the kamikiri motif in Sawaki Sūshi's Hyakkai zukan) and one hypothesis (Katsumi Tada) suggests Sekien may have seized on a pun between ami meaning 'net' (網) and ami referring to a mysid shrimp to invent or label this creature. Later 20th‑century writers projected the specific function of cutting nets onto Sekien's image; some folklorists (Kenji Murakami) consider these later tales uncorroborated and possibly modern inventions.

Sekien's 1776 illustration depicts a small chimera‑like creature variously described in sources as scorpion‑like or a cross between a serpent, bird, and lobster, notable for pincer claws resembling those of a crab or scorpion. Because Sekien supplied no caption or explanatory text, later descriptions and anatomical interpretations derive solely from the image; there is no canonical text defining its exact morphology.

In Shōwa‑period and later writings the amikiri is said to cut fishing nets, meshes hung out to dry, sudare (bamboo blinds), and household mosquito nets. A modern tale collected by Norio Yamada (1974) places such activity in a fishing village in the Shōnai region where nets were repeatedly shredded and mosquito nets left in houses were bitten through; researcher Kenji Murakami was unable to corroborate this local legend and treated it as likely Yamada's invention. The behavioral attribution thus stems from post‑Sekien literature rather than Sekien's original compendium.