This article is a companion to “[The Glory of the Imperial Exam (The Qujiang Banquet)]” in my Late Qing series. That one tells the story of being summoned by the Son of Heaven as the highest honor. This one shows the same summons from the other side.
If you have read The Elusive Samurai (Nige Jōzu no Wakagimi), you may remember chapter 53, “Haraguro” (“Black-Hearted”). People eager to be of service gather around Sasaki Dōyo, and he devours them — humming an old song as he eats.
That song is real. It is more than 1,200 years old, and it comes from the Man’yōshū, Japan’s oldest surviving anthology of poetry. In one sentence, it is the story of a poor crab who hurries to serve the emperor and is simply eaten.
Dōyo was the perfect singer for it. A close ally of Ashikaga Takauji, he was a basara lord who loved banquets and the arts — a man who sat right beside the table of power. Watching him hum a song about a creature being eaten, while he eats, tells you a great deal about how bottomless his cruelty is.
The poem
The song is No. 3886 in Book 16 of the Man’yōshū, titled “A song made to tell the pain of the crab.” It was performed by hokaibito — wandering performers who traveled from place to place reciting blessings and songs. The whole poem is told in the voice of a single reed crab.
The crab’s story, retold
I built a little hut among the reeds of Naniwa Bay, and there I lived, quietly, out of sight. Then word came: the Great Lord has summoned me.
Why would he want me? As a singer? A flute player? A koto player? No — I know perfectly well it is none of those. Still, a summons is a summons. So I traveled on, day after day, and entered the palace through the Middle Gate on the east side.
The moment I passed through the gate, they bound me with rope. But I am not a horse. I am not an ox.
They led me into a room. There I found bark from the elm trees, salt carried all the way from Naniwa, and a fine earthenware jar. I climbed inside. Tears spilled from my eyes. Into those eyes they rubbed salt, and rubbed it again, and made me into kitai, a cured delicacy — and the Great Lord praised me: “Delicious.”
The poem ends by repeating the same line twice: kitai hayasu mo, kitai hayasu mo — “How delicious, how delicious.” The last voice we hear is not the crab’s. It is the cheerful voice of the one eating.
✦ Satoe’s Take The original text says only “he rubbed salt into my eyes.” But I read it as salt rubbed into eyes that are already weeping. Tears are salty to begin with, and now more salt is pressed in. It is literally “rubbing salt in the wound.” And the verb for rubbing carries an honorific, as if the lord were bestowing a favor. The cruelest act in the poem is described in the most polite language.
(The details of climbing into the jar and the tears are my own retelling; the original does not state them.)
“Summoned” means “honored” — turned inside out
In my Late Qing series, I have written about the imperial examinations, in which being summoned to serve the emperor was the greatest achievement a man could hope for. The new graduates were feted at the Qujiang banquet, floating their wine cups down the stream.
Turn that glory inside out, and you get this crab. To be summoned by the Son of Heaven is also to be eaten by him.
And notice: the crab was living in hiding. It was following Confucius’ advice — when the state has lost the Way, roll up your talents and keep them hidden (→ “[The Analects: Serving When the State Has the Way]”). Even in retreat, it was called out and eaten. The ones who could tell this truth were not the scholar-officials who believed in the glory from inside the system. They were wandering performers, standing outside it.
Everyone lines up, gladly, to become the crab
In imperial China there were three gates to the emperor’s side. Men memorized the Confucian classics to pass the examinations — cutting off their own independent thought. Men who failed could cut off their manhood and become eunuchs. Women polished their beauty to become flowers of the inner palace. Three gates, one destination. The place where you are summoned is the place where you are eaten. And still, everyone competed, gladly, to become the crab.
What were they lining up for? A single word from the emperor. “Well done.” And the last thing the crab received was also a single word: “Delicious.” The praise everyone longed for, and the praise the salted crab received, were the same word. To receive the emperor’s highest praise was, in the end, to be eaten completely.
What was eaten was goodwill
Going to serve the emperor is not wrong in itself. The deepest tragedy lies somewhere else.
It is that the crab who sincerely wants to be useful is eaten with that sincerity intact. The one devoured was not the greedy or the ambitious, but someone who simply wanted to help. Perhaps the cruelest thing about power is not that it punishes the wicked. It is that it savors goodwill — and eats it whole.
Bound by rope, and by reverence
Japanese has a special honorific verb, tamawaru: to receive something — an object, a word — from someone far above you. In Qing China, imperial rewards like the yellow riding jacket, the peacock feather, permission to ride a horse inside the Forbidden City, a plaque in the emperor’s own hand, or an honorary posthumous name were the summit of a subject’s honor.
That honor is what kills the crab. The poem contains these lines:
uma ni koso fumodashi kaku mono / ushi ni koso hanazuna hakure A horse is the one you hobble; an ox is the one you lead by a nose-rope.
Most commentators read a complaint here: so why tie me up, when I am neither? When the crab passes through the gate, it is bound.
✦ Satoe’s Take But I suspect the crab would not have run even without the rope. It climbed into the jar on its own and stayed still while salt was rubbed into its eyes — because it was the lord’s summons, because it had been granted his words. The rope bound its body. What bound its heart was the honor of having “received.” The softest rope held it most tightly.
This “receiving” reaches even into death. In imperial China, an official sentenced to die might be “granted” death — a white silk cord or a cup of poisoned wine. Even that carried honor: the emperor acknowledged your rank and let you die with dignity. The truly miserable death was the one where nothing was granted at all — beaten to death by a nameless eunuch, spat upon (→ “[Noble Consort Qi]”). By that measure, the crab, tasted by the lord himself and praised as “delicious,” was among the honored.
If it was sung at a banquet, the banquet is the frightening part
Songs like this are thought to have been performed at feasts, as blessings or entertainment. That is exactly what makes it chilling. The ones laughing are the comfortable people close to power. They are enjoying, as a side dish to their wine, the spectacle of a well-meaning crab being carefully seasoned and eaten. Japanese has a saying for an easy mark: “a duck arriving with a leek on its back” — it brings its own garnish. This is the same scene.
✦ Satoe’s Take What the crab brings is not a leek but elm bark. Powdered elm bark was a seasoning for salted, fermented food. To the eaters, the crab is a lowly thing that cannot be eaten as it is. So they add elm, cure it in salt, let it mature in a jar, and only then condescend to taste it. Despising it, and devouring it all the same — that, to me, is the coldest part.
What the lord actually ate
The dish in the poem is crab cured with salt and powdered elm bark. Aged in a jar, it suggests a salted, fermented paste (hishio). Yet the poem calls it kitai, a word that originally meant dried meat or fish. Commentators disagree on whether the paste was then dried, or whether the paste itself was called kitai.
Either way, what the lord ate was not a cheap scrap from the shore but a court delicacy that took time and care to prepare. For that one bite, an entire crab was steeped and cured.
The hundred-day feast — curing happens on its own
Cured food takes time. The eater does not bite right away. It licks its lips and waits for the flavor to ripen.
✦ Satoe’s Take I think China’s Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898 was exactly this.
On June 11, the Guangxu Emperor launched his reform program. Just four days later, Empress Dowager Cixi dismissed his tutor Weng Tonghe and made her trusted ally Ronglu governor-general of Zhili, putting him in command of the troops around Beijing. She also ruled that any official newly appointed to the second rank or above must come and thank her in person. With personnel and the army secured, she withdrew to the Summer Palace and let the reform run (→ “[The Guangxu Emperor: The Last Emperor Who Said He Didn’t Need Power]”).
No rush to crush it. It tastes better when it is fully ripe.
And the most frightening thing about curing is that the eater never has to get its hands dirty. What is steeped changes from within. The reformers issued edict after edict, put their allies in the spotlight, and finally went as far as asking Yuan Shikai to help them restrain Cixi herself. No one forced them. They ripened on their own until they were ready to be eaten.
The predator’s finest skill is not the pounce. It is doing nothing, and waiting for the prey to finish preparing itself — the coldest form of the military maxim “to win without fighting” (→ “[Wei Liao]”).
On the 103rd day, perfectly ripe. “Well, I suppose it’s my turn now,” said [Cixi], and picked up her chopsticks.
Who is singing — and from which side?
It is tempting to read the poem from below: wandering performers, outsiders to power, wearing the mask of a comic song while telling their masters, “What you are eating is goodwill.”
But the clues also point the other way. After the poem comes a short editor’s note: “The above poem was composed to tell the pain of the crab.” If the crab were speaking for itself, no one would need to explain that someone had voiced its pain on its behalf.
✦ Satoe’s Take That note was written by the anthology’s compiler — someone on the court’s side. It is the voice of a person standing outside the crab, pitying it from above. Who truly mourns this crab? The poem keeps even that hidden, and has sat in front of us this way for more than a thousand years.
The crab, and the boy who runs
The Elusive Samurai is the story of Hōjō Tokiyuki, a boy who survives by running away. The crab hid, and was still summoned and eaten. Tokiyuki flees the table of power again and again, refusing to be served up. Perhaps this old song, hummed by Dōyo, is the shortest possible description of what Tokiyuki is running from.
My take — and my caveats
To be clear: the poem’s original meaning is generally understood as a humorous song that personifies food, or a song celebrating a feast. It is not a political allegory. Reading “summoned” as “eaten,” and reading the editor’s note as the eater’s gaze, are both my own interpretations. Scholars still debate how the hokaibito songs of Book 16 should be understood.
Still — the true nature of “being summoned,” which Chinese scholar-officials could not escape in two thousand years, appears here, flipped inside out, in a crab song by nameless Japanese performers. If even a hidden crab could be called out and eaten, then simply keeping your talents hidden is not enough to escape. That is why the choices of those who stepped outside the box, knowing the cost — Lin Zexu, Gong Zizhen, and Tan Sitong of the 1898 reform — weigh all the more heavily.
◀ Companion pieces: [The Glory of the Imperial Exam (The Qujiang Banquet)] | [The Analects: Serving When the State Has the Way] | [Du Fu, “Two Poems on Qujiang”]
◀ The hundred-day feast: [The Guangxu Emperor: The Last Emperor Who Said He Didn’t Need Power] | [Cixi and the Hundred Days’ Reform]
◀ Series index: The Late Qing Series — Complete Guide
Original text (Man’yōshū, Book 16, No. 3886)
おしてるや 難波（なには）の小江（をえ）に 廬（いほ）作り 隠（なま）りて居る 葦蟹（あしがに）を 大君召すと 何せむに 我を召すらめや 明（あき）けく 我が知ることを 歌人と 我を召すらめや 笛吹きと 我を召すらめや 琴弾きと 我を召すらめや かもかくも 命受けむと 今日今日と 飛鳥に至り 置くとも 置勿に至り つかねども 都久野に至り 東の 中の御門ゆ 参入り来て 命受くれば 馬にこそ ふもだし懸くもの 牛にこそ 鼻縄はくれ あしひきの この片山の もむ楡を 五百枝剥き垂り 天照るや 日の異に干し さひづるや 韓臼に搗き 庭に立つ 手臼に搗き おしてるや 難波の小江の 初垂りを からく垂り来て 陶人の 作れる瓶を 今日行きて 明日取り持ち来 我が目らに 塩塗りたまひ きたひはやすも きたひはやすも
Editor’s note: 右の歌一首は、蟹のために痛みを述べて作れるなり。— “The above poem was composed to tell the pain of the crab.”