The Legend

The Legend of Tomino’s Hell: The 1919 Poem, the Curse and the 2004 Book That Started It

By the Tomino’s Hell editors · Draft dated 2026-11-03 · About 15 minutes of reading · Draft: facts checked against the sources below; owner to review before publishing.

The short version: “Tomino’s Hell” (トミノの地獄, Tomino no Jigoku) is a real, strange and beautiful poem by Saijō Yaso, published in 1919.^{3, 7} The idea that reading it aloud brings misfortune is real folklore too – but it is a modern one. According to the best-sourced accounts, it traces to a 2004 book by the scholar Yomota Inuhiko, spread through Japanese blogs in 2005 and went global on the English-language internet in the 2010s.^{1, 2, 4, 6} No documented string of disasters follows people who read it.^{1, 2}

The poet: Saijō Yaso

Saijō Yaso was born on January 15, 1892, in Tokyo and died on August 12, 1970, aged 78, of acute heart failure at his home in Seijo, Setagaya.⁷ He was a poet, a scholar of French literature, and one of the most successful lyricists of twentieth-century Japan: he wrote children’s songs such as Kanaria and popular songs including Tokyo Ondo. He also taught at Waseda University and studied in France.^{1, 7} (His long career is a point in his favour in the curse debate; see below.)

The poem comes from his debut collection Sakin (砂金, “Gold Dust”), self-published in 1919.^{3, 4, 7} Kowabana says he was 26 when it appeared; that is the Japanese way of counting age, and by Western counting he had turned 27 that January.^{4, 7}

The poem: what it says (in our own words)

Why there is no full text here. The poem was published in 1919 and is free to read in the United States, but Saijō died in 1970 and, as we understand Japanese copyright law, his works are still protected in Japan. [Owner / counsel to confirm.] So we summarise instead of reproducing it, and quote only a single line. You will find the poem in published editions of his work, and Kowabana hosts an English translation with the romanised Japanese.⁴

The opening line is the one everybody remembers: 姉は血を吐く、妹は火吐く – roughly, “The older sister coughs up blood, the younger sister spits fire.”⁴

In outline, the poem is a short song of about twenty lines in a ballad rhythm. A beloved child called Tomino falls alone into hell, a dark place “where even flowers do not bloom”. A whip falls; a golden sheep and a nightingale are asked to guide the way; the child packs a leather bag for the journey. Spring arrives in the valleys of hell, a caged nightingale cries out for the sister, the echo rings through the valleys and a flower blooms in the dark. The final lines ask hell to bring “red pins” from the mountain of needles, as a mark to find Tomino by.⁴

That is the whole plot. Nothing in it explains who Tomino is, why they are in hell or whether the sisters are real. That gap is exactly why readers keep asking what it means.

What does it mean? Five readings

Saijō left no famous explanation, so interpretations come from readers and commentators.^{1, 5} The common ones:

1. A war poem. Kowabana’s reading: the sisters send a young man off to war (blood, fire, and “jewels” – tama, a word that sounds like tamashii, “soul”), and the final “red pins” are the stitches of a senninbari, the thousand-stitch belt women sewed for soldiers. If the stitches do not stand out, the body cannot be identified.⁴
2. A child soldier’s grief. Occult Lab lists this reading, which is close to the first.⁵
3. A girl sold into the pleasure quarters. Another domestic reading: a courtesan remembering being sold as a child.^{2, 5}
4. Forbidden love between sisters. Also reported by Occult Lab.⁵
5. A wandering in Buddhist hell. The simplest reading: hell is meant literally, in the traditional Buddhist sense of a realm of punishments with its needle mountains and bloody pools.²

Even Tomino’s gender is not stated in the Japanese; Occult Lab points this out, while Kowabana infers a boy from the sister imagery.^{4, 5} Anyone telling you the meaning is settled is selling something.

Where the curse came from

Here is the part that surprises most people: for most of its life, nobody called the poem cursed. Saijō read and published it for over fifty years, and he lived to 78.^{4, 7}

The sources point to this chain of events:

1. December 2004: the book. The comparative-literature scholar Yomota Inuhiko published the essay collection Kokoro wa Korogaru Ishi no Yō ni: Papers 2003–2004.⁹ webMu names it as the origin of the well-known “do not read it aloud” warning.² Kowabana quotes the claim as “If you by chance happen to read this poem out loud, after you will suffer from a terrible fate which cannot be escaped.”⁴
2. Terayama Shūji enters the story. A Japanese blogger who read the book wrote in January 2005 that, according to Yomota, the poet and film-maker Terayama Shūji read the poem aloud and died soon after.⁶ Occult Lab reports the same claim as Yomota’s view, without a date or wording.⁵ Terayama died on May 4, 1983, aged 47; he had been hospitalised for cirrhosis in 1979.⁸ Kowabana adds that Terayama’s 1974 film Den’en ni shisu (To Die in the Countryside) drew heavily on the poem, and that rumours of an unnamed female university student who died after reading it circulated around the same time.⁴
3. 2005 onwards: the Japanese web. The January 2005 blog post is a nice snapshot: the blogger had searched online and found no information at all about the claim, and asked readers if they knew more.⁶ In other words, the curse had effectively no web footprint before 2005.
4. 2010s: English-language spread. Kowabana’s 2018 article already complains of “a lot of misleading information about this particular legend in English”.⁴ By 2023 webMu reported translations into English, Spanish, Hindi and Indonesian, and a new life for the poem as a “curse poem” abroad.²

Caveat: neither we nor the English-language sources we checked have read Yomota’s book. The exact wording above comes from secondary sources and a blogger who read it.^{1, 4, 6} If you can check the original, the relevant passage is the thing to look at.

A wrinkle for fact-checkers: Kowabana’s article gives two dates for Terayama’s film and death in different places (a 1983 film in one paragraph, a 1974 film in another) and says he died “nine years after his film”. The 1974 film and 1983 death match the other sources; the 1983 film date looks like a slip.^{4, 8}

Timeline

The overseas additions that have no source

Many English retellings add a back-story: a disabled child who died of hunger and cold in an underground cell, whose diary became the poem. Japanese commentary treats this as an overseas interpretation, and nothing in the sources we opened supports it as history.^{1, 2} We would treat the diary story as fan fiction.

The same goes for the lurid “victim lists” on some sites: webMu notes that no wave of disasters befalling readers has been reported.²

What we cannot verify

• The exact words of Yomota’s original passage (we have not seen the book).
• Whether the Terayama link was in Yomota’s text or added in retellings – sources differ.^{5, 6}
• The “university student” who supposedly died: nobody has ever named her.⁴
• Any harm to any reader.

Source quality varies. Dates for Saijō’s death differ on some English sites (one analysis blog gives 1969); the Japanese Wikipedia entry gives August 12, 1970, and we use that.⁷ Some English sites also spell the scholar’s name “Yamota”; it is Yomota.⁹

Why the curse works as a story

A “do not read aloud” warning costs nothing to test, never has a victim list and can never be fully disproved, because bad things do eventually happen in anyone’s life. Add a haunting text with images of blood, whips and a lost child and the poem practically asks to be told as a ghost story.¹ That is also the space the Tomino’s Hell series plays in: fiction built on a real legend. For a short, evidence-first answer, read Is Tomino’s Hell Really Cursed?

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