Gagoze

This is, as far as anyone can tell, the oldest monster-killing story anybody wrote down in Japan — and it's a fight in a bell tower that ends with someone holding a scalp.

The temple with a problem

Gangō-ji, in Nara, in the Asuka period. Something is killing the boys who ring the bell at night. They go out to the tower and in the morning they're dead, and it keeps happening, and nobody will take the job.

The thing doing it is an oni — and the tradition is specific about where it came from. It's the ghost of a wicked temple servant, a man who worked there, who died, and who came back as something with claws.

The boy who was owed

The child who deals with it has an origin worth telling on its own.

A peasant, out in his fields, finds a thunder spirit fallen to earth in the shape of a child. Rather than doing what you might expect, he helps it — gets it back where it belongs.

The thunder spirit repays him with a son. The boy is born with serpents coiled about his head in some tellings, and he is impossibly strong from the start.

That boy ends up in service at Gangō-ji, hears about the bell tower, and volunteers.

The fight

He waits in the dark by the tower.

The oni comes. He grabs it — by the hair — and does not let go, and the demon cannot break the grip. So it runs, and he holds on, and it drags him with it through the temple grounds, and he keeps holding on.

They go until the scalp tears off.

The demon escapes into the night with its head bare, leaving its hair and skin in the boy's fist. In the morning they follow the blood, and the trail leads to the grave of the wicked servant.

The hair was kept. It became a temple treasure at Gangō-ji.

The boy became a priest, and his line of enormously strong temple children runs on into the later folk heroes — the boy raised by a mountain woman who wrestles bears, and every child of impossible strength who came after.

It gave Japan a word

Here's the coda, and it's the reason this one outlived its own story.

The temple's name — Gangō-ji, read another way as gagoze — became, in the mouths of children, a general word for monster. Not this demon specifically. Any of them. Parents used it the way English-speaking parents once used "bogeyman," and the word survived in nursery speech long after nobody remembered a bell tower in Nara.

Yanagita Kunio, the founder of Japanese folklore studies, disputed that etymology. He thought gagoze came instead from the noise monsters make when they come for you — *"kamou zo", meaning roughly "I'm going to bite you."*

Both explanations are excellent and there's no settling it. Either Japanese children spent centuries frightening each other with the name of a real temple in Nara, or with the sound of teeth about to close.

Gangō-ji is still standing, incidentally. It's a World Heritage site now, it has its own oni traditions, and it holds a demon-viewing event in February.