The Watching Doll of Okiku

The doll called Okiku is a small traditional figure of a girl in a kimono, with a round face and dark hair cut in a short, even fringe. It sits today on an altar at Mannenji temple in Iwamizawa, on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, and people travel a long way to look at its hair.

The story the temple tells begins in 1918. A young man bought the doll in Sapporo as a gift for his little sister, Okiku, a child of two or three. She adored it and carried it everywhere. The following year she fell ill and died, and the grieving family kept her doll on the household altar in her memory, a small stand-in for the daughter they had lost.

In time they noticed something they could not explain. The doll’s hair, cut short and level at the chin, seemed to be growing longer, creeping down past its shoulders. The family came to believe that the spirit of the dead child had settled into the doll she had loved, and that some part of her lingered there still.

When the family moved away in 1938 they could not bring themselves to take the doll from the place her memory belonged, and entrusted it instead to the monks of Mannenji, where it has remained ever since. According to the temple the hair must be trimmed from time to time, and returns. Believer and sceptic alike may make of that what they will; the monks simply keep the doll, and the little girl’s name, safe.

Provenance: purchased in Sapporo, Japan, in 1918; held at Mannenji temple, Iwamizawa, Hokkaido, since 1938.