Tokgabi and His Pranks

In Griffis’s portrait, Tokgabi is an endlessly mischievous sprite. He doesn’t care for sunshine or the open air, and nobody has ever seen him out in the street. He lives in the sooty flues that run beneath the floor all the way along the house, from the kitchen at one end to the chimney hole in the ground at the other. He loves smoke and soot, and he doesn’t mind fire or flames, for he likes to be warm. He has no lungs, and his skin and eyes are fireproof. He is as black as night and hates anything white, and he is always afraid of a bit of silver, even if it is only a hairpin.

What Tokgabi likes best is to play at night in the little loft above the fireplace, running along the rafters and knocking down the dust and cobwebs. His favorite game is making the iron lid of the rice pot dance up and down until it tumbles into the pot and can’t easily be got out. How many times the cook has burned or scalded her fingers fishing out that lid after Tokgabi pushed it in! And how she grumbles about the sooty little imp!

But Tokgabi is not always naughty, and some of his tricks hurt nobody. He is such a merry fellow that he is always busy, whether people laugh or cry. He doesn’t mean to cause trouble; he simply has to have fun every minute, especially at night. When the fire is out, he chases the mice up and down the flues under the floor and around the attic over the rafters, until the worn-out mice drop, and the hawks outside get many an easy breakfast.

For all his pranks, Tokgabi is kind to the kitchen maids. When a good servant is so worn out after a hard day that she falls asleep, he washes her dishes and wipes her tables, so that when she wakes, she finds her work done. Many fairy tales tell of this jolly sprite, of how he gives good things to really nice people and plays spiteful tricks on bad ones until they are furious.

People say that the king of all the Tokgabis has a museum of curiosities and a storehouse full of gold and jewels and fine clothes and every kind of sweet thing, all for good boys and girls and for old people who are kind to birds and animals. For bad people he keeps all sorts of ugly, troublesome things, and he punishes stingy people by making them poor and miserable.

The Tokgabi king also keeps a menagerie of animals that he sends out on errands to reward the good and punish the naughty. Every year the little almanac with the red and green cover tells which part of the sky the Tokgabi king lives in that year, so that farmers and country folk can keep out of his way and not anger him. The kind creatures in his menagerie, the friends of people, are the dragon, the bear, the tortoise, the frog, the dog and the rabbit. The cruel and sly ones, the messengers he sends when he punishes naughty folk, are the tiger, the wild boar, the leopard, the snake, the toad and the cat.

The everyday Tokgabi plays fewer tricks on men and boys and has more fun bothering girls and women, probably because they spend more time at home. In the households imagined here, where women beat washing with sticks, Tokgabi loves to grab the laundry sticks used for pounding and polishing the starched clothes and hide them where no one can find them. Then Father fusses because his long white coat has lost its shine, but it is all Tokgabi’s fault.

Tokgabi doesn’t like starch because it is white. He loves to dance on Father’s big black hat box hanging on the wall, and sometimes he jiggles the household charm that hangs from the rafters. Best of all, he likes to dance a jig among the dishes in the cupboard over the fireplace, making them rattle and often crash to the floor.

He likes to bother the men sometimes too. If Father gets his topknot caught in a rat hole, or his head slips off his wooden pillow in the night and he bumps his nose, it is Tokgabi’s fault. If anything goes wrong with a boy’s long braid, Tokgabi gets the blame. Some even say that wicked men make bargains with Tokgabi to help them do bad things, but the imp only goes along for the fun of it. He cares nothing about what people call right or wrong. He is only after fun and is always up to mischief, so you must keep an eye out for him.

The kitchen maids and the men believe they know how to outwit Tokgabi and spoil his tricks. Since the imp dislikes red, a young man who is engaged to be married wears bright red clothes. Since Tokgabi is afraid of shiny silver, men pin their topknots and girls fix their hair with silver hairpins. Magistrates and government officials wear little storks of solid silver in their hats, or have them embroidered in silver thread on their robes.

Everyone who can afford it uses white metal dishes and wears snowy clothes. Tokgabi dislikes anything white, and the narrator playfully connects this fear with the dazzling white clothes in his portrait. Mountains of starch are used to whiten and stiffen coats and skirts, sleeves and socks, and on festival days people look as if they had been dipped in starch and crusted over with rock candy. That is how they keep themselves safe from Tokgabi’s pranks.

About this story

“Tokgabi and His Pranks” is retold from William Elliot Griffis’s Korean Fairy Tales (1922). Tokgabi, now usually spelled dokkaebi, is a goblin of Korean folklore. This particular portrait gives him conflicting roles: helper, prankster and sometimes an accomplice to harm.

This piece is less a single story than a lively portrait of the goblin and of the household beliefs that grew up around him. Griffis places him in traditional ondol heating flues beneath the floor. His explanations for clothing colours and household mishaps are part of this fanciful portrait, not an established history of those customs.

Read the original: Korean Fairy Tales (Project Gutenberg)

Best for ages 6–8 — meet Tokgabi, the sooty little goblin who lives under the floor and gets the blame for everything.

Fun for whom?

Tokgabi may want amusement, but the cook’s burned fingers are a real cost within the story. Washing an exhausted maid’s dishes has a very different effect from hiding laundry sticks or breaking crockery. His mixed behaviour also unsettles the neat division between rewarding good people and punishing bad ones: some victims have done nothing wrong.

Sort the household episodes

Choose the pot lid, the washed dishes and the hidden laundry sticks. For each, record what entertains Tokgabi and what happens to the worker. Sort them as help, inconvenience or harm, giving a reason. Discuss these imagined accidents on paper, without trying any trick with fire or hot utensils.

Talk about it

• What kinds of things does Tokgabi get blamed for?
• Why do people wear white clothes and silver hairpins, according to this story?
• If a Tokgabi lived in your home, what do you think he would get up to?

Related stories

• Tokgabi’s Menagerie — more about the goblin king and his animals
• The Mirror That Made Trouble — another tale from Griffis full of everyday life in old Korea
• The Cat on the Dovrefell — mischievous creatures of another land, the trolls of Norway