Hiderigami

Where the hiderigami walks, the water dies.

Wells go dry. Rivers drop. The paddies crack open. It is the drought, walking around, and its body is built out of the same idea: one eye, one arm, one leg. A being made of insufficiency, producing insufficiency.

The Edo descriptions put it at somewhere between sixty and ninety centimetres, with its eyes set on top of its head, moving as fast as the wind.

But the reason to care about this one is that it used to be a goddess, and the story of how it stopped being one is genuinely tragic.

She won the war

In the Chinese myth, Ba is a daughter of the Yellow Emperor, and she has a power: she radiates drought.

The Emperor is at war with Chiyou, whose forces fight with storm — wind and rain and fog, weather as a weapon, and it is working. So Ba is deployed. She walks onto the field and the rain stops. The storm dies around her. The war is won because of her.

And she cannot turn it off.

The power that won the battle burns out whatever let her return to heaven. She's stranded on earth, permanently radiating the weapon, and wherever she goes the land fails. So she is banished north, to the parched country, and she becomes Hanba — the drought demon.

A veteran who won the war and can never come home, still doing the thing she was asked to do, forever, to people who didn't ask.

That's one of the great tragic mechanisms in any mythology, and Japan received it mostly as a small one-legged monster in a picture book, which is its own kind of sad.

Redesigned by every era that feared drought

The form keeps changing across the centuries — black-clad goddess, then ghost, then something vampiric, then a shapeshifter.

That's a useful thing to notice about how these beings work. A creature attached to a recurring, genuinely terrifying event doesn't sit still. Each generation that faces the thing redraws the being responsible in the shape of whatever it currently fears most.

Sekien drew the beast version in 1779. Later Chinese lore has the god Guan Yu himself sent to fight one for seven days.

And then the countermeasure

Which, after all that cosmic tragedy, is this:

Throw it in the toilet. That kills it.

The driest thing in the world, destroyed by being dropped into the wettest and lowest place in the house.

I want to point at the asymmetry here, because it's the whole entry.

To bring rain, Japanese tradition required enormous machinery: a dragon king summoned from a distant lake, the great monk Kūkai performing rites at the imperial palace pond, a formal state ceremony with the country watching.

To stop the thing that stops rain: any farmer's outhouse.

The gods are expensive. Getting rid of the drought demon is free, undignified, and available to anybody with a privy — which, given who actually suffers in a drought, may be the most honest piece of folk theology on this page.