Domokomo

Domokomo is a yokai with two identical heads sharing a single body, depicted in Edo-period yokai picture scrolls. It is tied to a folktale from Ishikawa's Enuma District and Nagano's Chiisagata District about two master physicians who died cutting off each other's heads in a contest of skill, and is told as the origin story of the expression "domo komo naranai" ("there is nothing to be done").

It survives only within picture scrolls; no account tells of anyone actually meeting it. It rises instead in the listener's imagination at the telling of a folktale from Ishikawa and Nagano, taking the shape of the two master physicians left as they were after their contest of skill went fatally wrong.

It appears by name and image alone, without accompanying text, in Edo-period picture scrolls such as Oda Gocho's Hyakki Yagyo Emaki (1832) and the Hyakumonogatari Bakemono Emaki (1780). It later came to be linked with a folktale from Ishikawa's Enuma District and Nagano's Chiisagata District, in which two rival master physicians die after severing and reattaching each other's arms, then finally their own heads, at the same instant. The tale is offered as the origin of the expression "domo komo naranai," though the phrase is attested earlier in an Edo-period joke-book, making this one of several folk etymologies rather than an established one.

Originally two separate master physicians, the two competed by severing and reattaching first their arms and then their own heads, until at last they severed their heads at the same instant and left no one able to reattach either, dying stitched together as one. Perhaps for this reason, the two faces wear an identical expression, seemingly still frozen mid-decision, unable to act with only half a mind each.