Nue

Monkey's head. Tanuki's body. Tiger's limbs. A snake for a tail.

And a voice like a bird crying in the dark.

The nue is Japan's chimera — and its most famous appearance has a date on it: 1153, over the imperial palace.

But the voice came first

This is the thing to understand about the nue, and it reverses how you'd expect a monster to work.

In the oldest Japanese poetry — the Man'yōshū era — "nue" is a bird. A night bird, whose sorrowful cry was read as an ill omen.

There's a strong scholarly consensus about which bird: the toratsugumi, the scaly thrush.

And if you've never heard one — go and find a recording, because it explains the entire entry. The scaly thrush sings at night, in the dark, and the sound is a thin, pure, wavering whistle with long silences between the notes. It doesn't sound like a bird. It sounds like something signalling. People who hear it without knowing what it is describe it as one of the eeriest natural sounds in Japan.

So the sequence is: a real sound, in the dark, that unsettled people for centuries — and then, eventually, a body was assembled to account for it.

The monster grew around a noise.

1153

Emperor Konoe is falling ill, night after night.

Every night a black cloud settles over the palace, and there is a crying voice in it, and the emperor sickens.

(Konoe is the same emperor the fox-woman Tamamo-no-Mae is said to have bewitched. That court had a decade nobody would want.)

They send for an archer: Minamoto no Yorimasa.

He looses one arrow into the cloud.

The nue falls. His retainer Ino Hayata finishes it on the ground with a blade.

And the emperor's health instantly recovered.

The sword is in a museum

Yorimasa's reward was a sword, given in imperial gratitude, named Shishiō — "Lion King."

It exists.

It's a Heian-period tachi, held at the Tokyo National Museum, designated an Important Cultural Property in 1971.

You can go and look at the blade they gave the man who shot the chimera.

And the corpse got three graves

They put the body in a boat and set it adrift.

And the river did what rivers do, which is spread things out — so the burial claim multiplied.

There are nue-zuka — nue mounds — at Ashiya, at Osaka, and at Kyoto.

One carcass. Three graves. Memorials seeded down the length of a watershed, each community claiming the body washed up on their stretch.

They're still there. Still maintained.

It's one of the best-documented things in the tradition

Which is worth stopping on, because most of these creatures reach us through a single source.

The nue record runs from 905 to 1774, and the Heike Monogatari account is corroborated by court diaries — the private journals of aristocrats who were in Kyoto at the time and wrote down what was going around.

Whatever happened, a lot of people independently thought something had.

There's a hypothesis about the anatomy, too, offered as a hypothesis. The four animals — tiger, snake, monkey, dog — are all zodiac creatures, and they may map to directions in the sexagenary cycle. Which would make the nue not a random chimera but a compass — assembled from the beasts of specific quarters, arriving over the palace from all of them at once.

I like it. It isn't proven.

The word survived the belief

Modern Japanese still uses nue, and nue-teki, for anything whose true nature can't be determined.

A person you can't get a fix on. A policy that's four incompatible things at once.

Politicians get called nue.

Which is a good end for a monster. The chimera stopped being a creature and became a word for anything that won't resolve into one thing — which is, when you look back at it, exactly what it always was: a head from here, a body from there, and underneath all of it a bird nobody could see.