Kobutori Jiisan

An old man with an enormous lump on his cheek gets caught in a storm and shelters in a hollow tree.

And in the night he hears music.

He looks out, and there in the mountain dark the oni are having a party. Sake, instruments, firelight, and demons dancing.

Now. Everything else in this collection tells you what to do here: stay still, don't look, don't make a sound, and above all do not engage.

He goes out and dances.

And he's good

That's the thing. He isn't humouring them and he isn't performing under duress. He's an old man who likes dancing, and he throws himself into it, and he is genuinely good.

The oni are delighted. They've never seen anything like it. They demand he come back tomorrow night and do it again.

And to make sure he does, they take collateral.

They take the lump off his cheek — reasoning, quite sincerely, that a man would obviously treasure such a thing and would come back for it.

He walks home with his face whole, having been robbed of a disfigurement by demons who thought they were being shrewd.

The neighbour

There's a second old man in the village with a matching lump, and he hears about this and wants the same.

So he goes up the mountain, finds the party, and dances.

Badly.

And the oni — disappointed, and feeling that the arrangement has been dishonoured — give him back the first man's lump, in addition to his own.

He comes down with two.

The economy of it

What I love here is that the oni are running an honest system, and it's the opposite of every other demon transaction in this tradition.

They pay for joy. They fine for envy. The judging is fair — the second man really did dance badly — and the penalty is precisely proportionate: he came seeking an unearned reward, and he received an unearned burden.

Nobody is eaten. Nobody is cursed. There is no violence at all.

These are the same species that elsewhere in this collection devours travellers, raids villages, and has to be poisoned with sake and beheaded in its sleep. Here they're running amateur night, and judging it honestly.

Dance as the currency

It also puts this small tale in surprisingly deep company.

The founding scene of Japanese myth is a goddess dancing on an upturned tub in front of a cave to make eight hundred myriad gods laugh, so that the sun would come out and look.

Dance is the tradition's hard currency at the boundary between worlds — the thing that reaches across when nothing else will.

An old man dancing well for demons in the rain is that same law, running at village scale.

It's older, and it isn't only Japanese

The tale is in the Uji Shūi Monogatari, from the early thirteenth century, and the medieval version ends with a flat one-line moral warning against envy.

And Ireland has it too.

The Legend of Knockgrafton: a hunchbacked man hears the fairies singing, joins in and improves their song, and they remove his hump. His envious neighbour tries the same, sings badly, and receives the first man's hump on top of his own.

Same story. Fairies for oni.

Two islands at opposite ends of the world, independently deciding that the supernatural rewards a good performance and punishes a grasping one — and that the specific unit of payment is a lump on somebody's face.