Who Is Washing the Beans? Searching for the Source of the Azuki-arai's Sound

The azuki-arai is known not by its looks but by its sound: a shoki-shoki by the river, like someone washing azuki beans. People who heard it wondered long and hard about who, or what, was making that noise. So let's go on a little hunt for the source of the azuki-arai's sound.

Washing beans was an everyday sound

Before you make sweet red bean paste or sekihan (rice cooked with red beans), you first wash the dried azuki beans in water. Stir them by hand in a basket or a tub, and the beans rub against each other with a small, dry shaki-shaki, shoki-shoki.

Back when people did their washing by rivers and wells, this was a sound everyone knew from daily life. That's exactly why, when it came from a riverbank at night where no one should be, people thought at once: someone is washing beans. A familiar sound, coming from a place where it couldn't possibly be. That may be where the azuki-arai's eeriness really lies.

Named after the sound itself

The azuki-arai is said to go by different names from place to place, such as "azuki-togi" (bean rinser) and "azuki-sarasara." Nearly all of them simply turn the sound into a name.

Some people hear the same sound as "shoki-shoki," others as "sarasara," much like we still describe rain or insect song with all sorts of different words today. With so few stories about what it looks like, the azuki-arai's many names seem to preserve the ears of the people in each place.

Old guesses: foxes, tanuki, otters

So who was making the sound? Some old tales actually name a culprit. In many places, it's said, the noise was blamed on animals believed to trick people, such as foxes, tanuki (Japanese raccoon dogs), mujina (badgers), and river otters.

Otters in particular once lived in rivers all over Japan, and many tales say they could bewitch people. Linking a strange noise by the river at night to a familiar animal that lived in that very river must have felt like natural reasoning. For people back then, "a yokai did it" and "an animal did it" were not so far apart.

The insect called "azuki-arai"

Here's another fun detail. There's a tiny insect, the booklouse (chatatemushi in Japanese), that sits on paper sliding doors and makes a faint sound, and it's said to have another name too: "azuki-arai." Someone in a hushed room must have heard its soft rustle as the sound of beans being washed.

The name of a riverside yokai became the nickname of a little insect inside the house. Perhaps "the sound of washing beans" was a kind of yardstick for people back then, the sound they reached for whenever they tried to describe a small noise with no clear source.

Why azuki beans?

Finally, why azuki beans, and not rice or soybeans? No clear answer has come down to us. But azuki beans were a must on special days, in sekihan for celebrations or in the azuki rice porridge eaten at Koshogatsu, the "little New Year." Their red color, it's said, was long thought to have the power to drive away evil.

A bean for special days, not everyday meals, and the sound of someone washing it by an empty river. Seen that way, even a story about a simple noise starts to carry a little air of mystery.

The azuki-arai has company among unseen yokai, such as the sunakake baba, who sprinkles sand in shrine forests. You'll find the azuki-arai's own legend on its Yokaipedia page. Next time you walk along a river, listen closely. Is there a shoki-shoki mixed in with the sound of the water?