Momiji

Autumn on Mount Togakushi, and the maples are at their absolute peak.

Taira no Koremochi is up there hunting demons — sent by the local Hachiman shrine, which had asked for the job to be done.

And he comes across a party.

A noblewoman's maple-viewing banquet. Silk curtains hung between the trees. Music. Wine being poured. The lady of the gathering is Princess Sarashina, and she is beautiful, and she invites him to sit.

So he sits. And he drinks. And the leaves are the finest he's ever seen, and the wine keeps coming, and eventually he sleeps.

And Hachiman speaks in the dream

The god comes to him while he's out and tells him the truth.

There is no Princess Sarashina. The woman pouring his wine is the demoness Momiji.

And in the fuller tellings, when Koremochi wakes, the god has left him something — a sword, in his hand, that was not there when he lay down.

The fight

What follows is the grandest battle in the whole demoness cycle.

She drops the disguise. And the image the tradition gives her is one of the best in Japanese art: the demoness with horns made of burning trees — autumn itself gone hostile, the flame-red maples growing straight out of her skull.

Against the sword a god put in a sleeping man's hand.

The trap is the season

I keep coming back to how the ambush is built, because it's more elegant than demons usually manage.

She doesn't lure him with treasure or with a woman in distress. She uses maple-viewing.

Which is a real and beloved Japanese practice — momijigari, going out specifically to look at the autumn leaves, the way people do for cherry blossom in spring. It is one of the most wholesome things a person can be doing.

Her name is the leaves. Momiji means autumn maple.

So the trap is: the most beautiful thing in the country, at the exact moment it's most beautiful, offered to a man who has every cultural reason to stop and look.

The season's beauty, weaponized. He walked into it the way anyone would.

The village that's named after her leaving

The legend belongs to Kinasa and Togakushi, in Nagano. And Kinasa keeps its own piece of it in the place-name.

Kinasa-no-Sato — the village without an oni.

The landscape renamed by her removal. Not "the place where she was killed" — "the place she is no longer." Defined by an absence.

There's also a backstory that circulates locally, and I'll give it to you with the caveat attached: Momiji as an exile from the capital — a beautiful woman sent away from Kyoto, who became a bandit and a sorceress out in the mountains before she became a demoness.

That's a familiar and uncomfortable shape. The court sends a woman away, and what the mountains get back is a monster. It circulates widely; I can't hand you a firm source for it.

And then she went into every medium Japan ever had

This is the part I find genuinely remarkable about her.

Noh. Momijigari, by Kanze Nobumitsu, late Muromachi — the banquet, the sleep, the transformation. It's still performed.

Kabuki. Meiji-era, a spectacular staging, one of the great roles.

Sekien catalogued her as a yokai in 1781.

And then, in 1899:

Momijigari was filmed — a record of the kabuki performance — and it is credited as Japan's first narrative film.

Sit with that.

The very first story ever put on film in Japan was this one. A medieval demon legend from a mountain in Nagano was the thing the country reached for when it got hold of a movie camera.

She has been performed in every storytelling medium Japan has produced, from masked drama in the fifteenth century to the first reel of Japanese cinema. Four hundred years of technology, and she is at both ends of it.