運命の赤い糸 unmei no akai ito The Red Thread of Fate

In Japan today, 運命の赤い糸 is generally pictured on the little finger of the hand. It runs to the one a person will marry. 運命 unmei is fate, 赤い akai is red, and 糸 ito is thread. As a figure of speech, 糸 is also what ties things together, as in the thread of fate.

A Japanese dictionary, the 故事成語を知る辞典, lists 運命の赤い糸 as a variant of an older word, 赤縄 sekijō, the red cord. By extension that word means the bond of husband and wife.

The Tang tale is set in 628. 韋固 Wei Gu, a young man looking for a wife, comes before dawn to an inn. An old man sits on the steps with his bag, reading by the setting moon. His book is the marriage register of the world. In his bag are red cords, to tie the feet of husband and wife. Once a cord is tied, he says, it can never be escaped. The bride he is shown is a girl of three. Fourteen years later Wei Gu marries her.

In the Tang tale the old man ties the feet with a cord. A second Chinese tale has the thread. A young man is to marry one of a minister's five daughters. Each holds out a silk thread before a curtain, and he is to pull one. He pulls a red silk thread and gets the third daughter. That thread is drawn by chance, not tied by fate.

The scholar 古田島洋介 Koteshima Yōsuke showed in 1993 how the two tales ran together in Chinese wording by the Yuan. In the eighteenth-century novel 紅楼夢, the old man under the moon ties a couple's feet with just one red silk thread. A character in it opens with a saying she calls old: a marriage a thousand li apart is drawn together by one thread.

The missionary Justus Doolittle wrote of China in 1865, chiefly of Fuzhou. He saw two long threads of red silk sent with the betrothal cards. To explain them, he was told the tale of the cord. In common parlance, it is said that their feet have been tied together.

In Japan the cord passed into the hands of the country's own gods. A novel of 1821 by 十返舎一九 Jippensha Ikku tells it as handed down. Year after year the gods of Japan gather at the great shrine of Izumo. There they tie for each couple the bond of the red cord. A comic verse of 1832 puts it in a line: the red cord: the gods tie it at Izumo in a fast knot.

In a story by 太宰治 Dazai Osamu, the narrator and his younger brother talk about the red thread on a harbor pier at night. Their teacher had told the class of it. An invisible red thread is tied to the little toe of the right foot. Its other end is tied to the same toe of a certain girl. However far apart the two may be the thread does not break.

In 1995 a wedding hall told the scholar 古田島洋介 Koteshima Yōsuke that its television commercial had run for more than ten years. In the commercial, as he wrote, a mother tells her daughter on her wedding day: you and the man you marry have been tied, little finger of the hand to little finger, by a red thread since you were born. In 2016 the scholar 遠藤星希 Endō Seiki wrote that a thread tied to the little finger of the hand is the general understanding we share.

Our history of the phrase offers a reading, signed as a reading and not as a finding. In it, the word 小指 carried the thread from the foot to the hand. The teacher's tale as Dazai printed it already says 小指, little finger, of the right foot. The dictionaries we read give 小指 to the hand and the foot alike. Its other uses belong to the hand: a raised little finger for a lover, and the pinky promise. Retell the tale without of the right foot, and the thread is on the finger. The cord of the old tale binds the feet. The thread most Japanese now picture on the little finger is late, and no less theirs for that.

The Tang tale 定婚店, from the ninth-century 續玄怪錄 and kept in the Taiping guangji of 977–978, in which an old man under the moon ties the feet of those fated to marry with a red cord; told in Japanese by 1706; the red thread on the toe, and then on the little finger, is Japanese and of the twentieth century: on the toe in Dazai's story of 1933, on the little finger by 1965.