Mujina

The mujina is a shapeshifting animal, and the interesting thing about it is that nobody can agree what animal it is.

In one province a mujina is a badger. In the next province the same word means tanuki. Somewhere else it's a palm civet.

The word slides across species depending on where you're standing.

As a spirit, it's the gentle one

Where the trickster animals are concerned, the mujina is the mildest of the bench.

It turns into a priest or a minor official — never anything grand — and the record specifically says it has "a gentle heart."

It glows faintly, the way the fox does.

And it's fierce in exactly one circumstance: when its den is threatened. Otherwise it's out doing an impression of a mid-ranking bureaucrat and bothering nobody.

Then in 1924 the confusion reached the Supreme Court

This is real, it's taught in Japanese law schools, and it is my favourite thing in this entry by a long way.

A hunter in Tochigi killed an animal he called a mujina.

Prosecutors charged him, because what he had actually shot was a tanuki — a protected species, out of season.

His defence was, essentially, a linguistic one. Where he lived, tanuki and mujina are different animals. He didn't hunt a tanuki. He hunted a mujina. He knew what a tanuki was and this wasn't one.

The case went all the way up. The Supreme Court ruled for the hunter — formally on a technical point about the hunting dates rather than on the word question itself.

But the tanuki-mujina incident is still a standard case in Japanese legal education, on the question of what happens when a statute uses a word that means different things in different valleys.

Which makes this the best evidence in the whole tradition that folk taxonomy — the pre-modern, regional, monster-era way of sorting the world's animals — did not go away. It survived into the twentieth century intact enough to walk into a courtroom and win.

The state had a species list. The countryside had a different one. In 1924 they met, and the countryside was not simply overruled.

And then there's the Hearn problem

Lafcadio Hearn wrote the most famous faceless-ghost story in English. A man meets a weeping woman by a moat; she turns, and she has no face — just smooth skin where the features should be. He flees to a noodle vendor, blurts out what he saw, and the vendor says did it look something like this? and wipes his own face blank.

Hearn titled it "Mujina."

Because in the Japanese source, the faceless thing was assumed to be a mujina's prank — the animal doing a trick, not a species of ghost.

English readers, reasonably, took the title as the creature's name.

So there's now a whole English-language tradition in which "mujina" means "faceless ghost," which it never did in Japanese. The word meant the badger-or-tanuki-or- civet that was pulling the stunt.

An animal so poorly defined that it lost a species argument in its own language and then got misfiled in another one.

One loose end that ties up neatly

Sado Island's great tanuki commander — the boss of the island's animals, who raised a rebellion and has shrines — is called a mujina in Sado's own tradition.

Which is exactly the point. The most famous tanuki in Japan is, at home, a mujina.