The Hot Spring Guardian
Keeps the water hot and the ledger honest. Wears the house yukata, refuses to leave the bath before closing.
Genesis
Gotoku
Kats
五徳猫
Go-to-ku Neko
7,777 pixel maneki-neko named after a yokai that wears a kettle stand for a crown. They turn up wherever somebody has a fire going, from Edo shrine gates to the rooftops of a Tokyo that has not happened yet.
Meooowww
Mint on OpenSea · 0.0005 ETH
Lore縁起
The forgotten virtues
Toriyama Sekien drew the gotoku-neko around 1784, in the last of his four illustrated yokai books. It is an old cat with a forked tail, sitting far too close to the hearth and blowing the flames up through a length of bamboo, with an iron kettle stand turned upside down on its head like a crown. Gotoku is the word for that kettle stand.
It is also the word for five virtues, and that is the entire joke. Sekien was pointing at a passage in Essays in Idleness about a courtier called Yukinaga, who was asked to perform the Dance of Seven Virtues, got partway through, and forgot two of them. The court called him the Man of Five Virtues for the rest of his life. Sekien's note is that the cat is forgetful in much the same way.
So the name is a mistake wearing a crown, which suits a lucky cat better than anything we would have come up with. There are 7,777 of these, still sitting wherever somebody else has lit a fire, watching the kettle.
名
Name
Gotoku-neko. Trivet cat.
類
Type
Nekomata. An old cat, tail split in two.
出
Source
Sekien, Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro, c. 1784.
居
Habitat
The hearth. Wherever it is warmest.
癖
Habit
Stokes the fire through a bamboo pipe. Forgets things.
Proofs試し刷り
Four eras
The Cyber Alchemist
Trades fortune for compute on a wet rooftop above the signage. The stone it carries is not decorative.
The Shogun's Favor
Sat at the castle gate for three hundred springs. Received a crest, kept the crest, granted nothing for free.
The Tide Collector
Works the sand where the gate stands in the water. Takes its cut twice a day and calls the tide a partner.
Plates 005 to 031
The kettle釜
The mechanic
A gotoku is a trivet. Its whole job is to hold a kettle over a fire somebody else lit, which is the position the cat has been in since 1784. So the royalties go in the kettle. It sits in the open where anyone can watch the level come up.
Once it crosses the line the contract arms itself and any holder can take it off the fire, which opens the round. Whoever tips it keeps a little of what spills, for the trouble. Nobody here is in the room when it happens, and that is the part worth reading twice.
Kettle goes on the fire with the contract
The edition発行
Edition details
Supply
7,777
Confirmed.
Chain
Robinhood
Confirmed.
Price
0.0005 ETH
Confirmed.
Mint
Public
No allowlist.