Itsumade

Over the imperial palace in Kyoto, in the plague year of 1334, a bird circled at night.

It had a human face. A curved beak with saw teeth in it. A snake's body. A wingspan of nearly five metres.

And it called out, in words:

*"Itsumade... itsumade..."*

"Until when? Until when?"

An archer, Oki Jirōzaemon Hiroari, brought it down with a special arrow — which is, beat for beat, what happened a hundred and eighty years earlier when a different archer shot a different monster off the roof of a different emperor's palace. Japan has a recurring civic emergency: something wrong lands on the imperial residence, and a marksman is sent for.

What it was asking

The reading that gives this creature its force is modern, and I'll flag it as modern, but it fits the setting so exactly that it's hard to put down.

The cry is the reproach of the unburied dead.

1334 was an epidemic year, at the end of a period of serious warfare. The corpses of the plague dead and the battlefield dead were not being properly handled. There were too many, and there was no one to do it, and they lay where they were.

Until when?

Not a threat. Not a curse. A question, asked over and over, all night, above the court responsible — by something with a human face, in human words, that nobody can answer.

It may be the quietest devastating thing in this entire tradition. A monster whose whole body is a question the living won't answer, circling the building where the answer would have to come from.

The name is an editor's decision

Here's a provenance detail worth knowing, because it's the benign version of something this collection usually treats as a problem.

The Taiheiki, the fourteenth-century chronicle that records the event, doesn't call it an itsumade. It just calls it a demon bird.

The name itsumade is Sekien's coinage, four centuries later. He took the cry, chose kanji for it, drew the creature, and thereby established it as a distinct being with an identity.

So the monster is medieval and the name is an Edo editorial decision.

Normally that pattern is the beginning of a problem — an artist invents a pedigree, later readers take it as ancient, and the record gets muddled. Here it's the opposite. Sekien didn't fabricate anything. He found a nameless horror in a chronicle and gave it the only name it could possibly have: the thing it was saying.

That's accretion of the good kind. Naming as curation.

There's a variant modern reading, too, that goes further and makes the bird the war-dead themselves, transformed — not asking on their behalf but arriving in person, in avian form, to put the question directly.

Either way it's the same question, and nobody in the palace answered it.