Benzaiten

Benzaiten is the goddess of everything that flows.

That's not a poetic gloss, it's close to the literal job description: water, music, speech, the arts, love, wisdom, wealth, good fortune. Anything that moves, runs, pours, or is passed from one person to another is hers.

She started as Saraswatī, in India — the river goddess of the Vedas who became the goddess of learning and music — and she came east through Buddhism, picking up duties the whole way. By the time she settles in Japan she is holding a biwa, the pear-shaped lute, and she is installed at the water's edge.

That last part is why she's everywhere. Go to almost any pond of any size in Japan, look for the small island in the middle, and there will be a shrine on it, and it will be hers. Enoshima. Chikubushima. Ten thousand park ponds. She takes the island, or the spit, or the cave by the sea — always the place where the land stops.

Why she's in a book about monsters

Because of the snakes.

Benzaiten is identified with Ugajin — a deity with the body of a white snake and a human head — and in some images she wears him coiled on top of her crown, a small bearded man's face rising out of the serpent above hers. White snakes are her messengers. The snake-days of the old calendar are her feast days. Money washed at her springs is supposed to multiply, and the practice is still running at a shrine in Kamakura where people queue with baskets.

Which puts her at one end of a spectrum that this collection spends a lot of time at the other end of.

Japanese folklore is full of women who become serpents. The most famous is Kiyohime, who was spurned by a monk, pursued him in a rage across a river, transformed into a dragon-serpent on the way, and burned him alive inside the temple bell he was hiding under.

Same transformation. Same animal. Benzaiten is what it looks like when the serpent is not rage but grace — the identical creature, pointed at fortune and music instead of at revenge.

The dragon who reformed

Her founding legend at Enoshima, from a text of 1047, contains the single strangest monster-defeat in Japanese folklore, and it's worth telling properly.

There was a five-headed dragon terrorizing the region — devouring children, causing floods and earthquakes, the full catalogue.

Benzaiten descends, in storms, and raises the island of Enoshima out of the sea.

The dragon sees her, and falls in love.

He proposes. She refuses him — on the explicit grounds that he is a monster who eats children. So he stops. He gives up all of it, reforms completely, and devotes himself to protecting the people he had been destroying. And when he dies, he becomes a hill, lying there facing her island, which is a real hill you can go and look at.

Count the ways monsters are dealt with in this tradition. Cut down. Poisoned with sake. Sealed under stones. Prayed away. Argued out by an ascetic. Outwitted with a riddle.

This one was talked out of it, and then spent the rest of his life doing better, because a goddess told him no and gave him a reason.