Nodeppō

The nodeppō — "field gun" — is a tanuki-ish, flying-squirrel-ish beast of the northern mountain valleys that comes for you at dusk to drink your blood.

And its method is, without competition, the strangest weapon in Japanese folklore.

It shoots bats at your face

From its mouth.

It opens up and releases a volley of live bats, which fly at you and cover your face, blinding you — and while you're clawing at a faceful of wings, it does what it came to do.

That's the 1841 picture-book, straight.

A mammal that uses a second species as ammunition.

Which is an escalation, and you can chart it

There's a whole family of Japanese monsters whose entire attack is covering your face, and the nodeppō is the last one on the list.

The nobusuma — the flying squirrel — slaps itself flat over your face. Contact weapon.

The fusuma — a sliding paper door — drops on you from above and wraps.

The ittan-momen — a strip of white cotton cloth, flying — winds itself around your head.

Each of those has to reach you. Each of them is the thing that covers you.

The nodeppō is the only member of the family that attacks without touching you. It stands off at range and sends something else.

The face-covering family developed artillery.

And there's a joke buried in the ammunition

This is the part that makes me think the artist knew exactly what he was doing.

Remember the transformation ladder: an aging bat becomes a nobusuma, and an aged nobusuma becomes the breath-stealing mountain-father.

Bats are the larval stage of that whole lineage.

So a creature that fires bats out of its mouth is either the ladder's quartermaster — stocking the pipeline — or its parent, spitting out the next generation at somebody's face.

One gag, and the whole ecosystem is in it.

The counter is a plant

Carry something spiny in your pocket, and you're protected.

Thorns against wings. That's it.

And it's a good addition to the tradition's list of things that repel monsters, which is consistently more domestic than you'd expect: miso. Tooth-blacking dye. Your own saliva. Tobacco smoke. Ash from the cooking fire.

Now a thorny weed in your pocket.

Nothing on that list is holy. Not one of them requires a priest. These are the countermeasures of people who had to walk home in the dark and used what was in the house.

The unglamorous alternative reading

The folklorist Tada offered a different account, and it deserves a hearing.

Rather than a blood-drinker, he links the nodeppō to the cloth-monster class — and in that reading it steals food, not blood.

Which is almost certainly closer to how this started.

Picture the actual incident. You're walking home at dusk with your shopping. Something comes out of the trees, there's a chaotic moment of wings and dark and your face, and when it clears — your groceries are gone.

That's a real thing that could happen, in a country with large gliding mammals and unlit paths.

The blood came later. It usually does. These entries tend to begin as mundane loss and acquire fangs on the way to the printer.

There's also an unresolved argument about whether the animal underneath is an aged badger or a transformed bat, which is a version of a naming fight that runs all through this tradition and has never been settled for anything.