Samebito

Samebito appears in a Japanese tale as a creature of the sea found stranded and in distress, black of body with green eyes, a beard, and a shape between man and shark. He explains that he has been driven from service at the undersea palace of the dragon king and cannot return, and a man takes pity on him and gives him a pond to live in and food to eat, which he accepts with great gratitude.

The turn of the story comes when the benefactor falls into a hopeless love and needs a quantity of jewels he cannot obtain. Samebito, distressed at his friend's grief, weeps, and the tears that fall from his green eyes harden into rubies as they touch the ground, in such number that the difficulty is solved. The weeping is not performed to order — it happens because he is genuinely grieved — and the tale is careful about that distinction.

He is later recalled to the palace and departs, so the story closes with the friendship ended by circumstance rather than by any fault. The material is a single literary tale rather than a widespread folk tradition, which means the creature is unusually well characterised for a bestiary entry and unusually unsupported by parallel versions; the reference works carry it largely as it stands.

The paragraphs below are extrapolated; no source supports them.

Read as a personality, Samebito comes across as remarkably warm for a monstrous-looking being — grateful, openly emotional, and attached to the person who showed him kindness rather than to any place or rank. His usefulness is inseparable from his feeling, which is unusual: the jewels only exist because the grief is real. He reads as someone displaced and without resources who repays what little he receives at a scale far beyond it, and who has no apparent resentment about the exile that put him there.