Shuten-dōji

This is the greatest monster story Japan produced, and it does not go the way you expect.

The problem

During Emperor Ichijō's reign, around the year 1000, young women were vanishing from Kyoto.

Daughters of good families. Repeatedly. And nobody could work out where they went.

The diviner Abe no Seimei ran the divination and gave them an answer: the oni-king of Mount Ōe.

Shuten-dōji — "the drunkard boy."

The operation

They sent Minamoto no Raikō and his four retainers. Five men, against a demon king and his court.

And they did not go as warriors.

They went disguised as yamabushi — mountain ascetics. Wandering holy men, the one class of person who could plausibly turn up anywhere without explanation.

They were received as guests.

And Shuten-dōji fed them. Human flesh, and blood served as wine, because that is what the house had.

They ate it. You have to, if you're maintaining a disguise.

And then they produced their own gift: a sake they had been given by gods along the road. Jinbenkidoku-shu — "divine elixir, poison to demons."

He drank it. Freely, and at length, because he was the drunkard boy and this was his own banquet.

The true form

Drunk, he reverted, and the description is enormous.

Fifty feet tall. A red body. A five-horned head. Fifteen eyes.

And Raikō beheaded him while deities held down the limbs.

And the severed head kept fighting — flew at him, and bit down on his stacked helmets, which is why he'd worn several.

And then the dying oni says the line

This is why the story is great, and why it has lasted a thousand years.

As he dies, Shuten-dōji cries out:

> 鬼に横道なし > > *Oni ni yokonashi. > > Demons have no crookedness.*

Meaning: we don't do this. We don't lie to guests. We don't accept hospitality and poison the host. That's yours.

And he is right.

Look at what actually happened. He took five strangers in off the mountain. He fed them from his own table. He drank what they offered him because they were guests and it would have been rude not to.

They came in holy men's clothing, ate his food, and poisoned him at his own banquet.

The monster gets the ethical last word, and the tradition kept it — through the scrolls, through the stage versions, through centuries of retelling. Nobody edited it out.

Everyone knew whose behaviour was worse.

Who he was before

Two origin stories circulate, and both are good.

Echigo: he was an abandoned temple page who became a demon. The fuller version makes him a blacksmith's son, carried sixteen months in the womb, born with teeth and hair.

Which is the monstrous-birth dread of this tradition — the thing that isn't supposed to survive — except that here it survived, and grew up.

Mount Ibuki: he is the son of Yamata no Orochi, the eight-headed serpent, by a human woman.

And that paternity comes with an inheritance the text names explicitly: the serpent's love of alcohol.

Which makes the whole thing rhyme across generations. Orochi was killed with eight vats of sake, one per head, while he slept it off.

His son was killed the same way, by the same method, on the same weakness.

Japan's greatest drinker, undone by drink, because his father was.

The sword is real

Dōjigiri Yasutsuna — "Demon-Child Cutter" — the blade that took the head.

It exists. It is a National Treasure, one of the Five Greatest Swords Under Heaven, and you can see it in Tokyo.

Even the head's grave is disputed. One tradition puts it at the Kubizuka at Oinosaka Pass, where the head is said to have refused to go any further down the road. Another keeps it on Ōeyama.

The head wouldn't be carried into the capital. That detail, too, everybody kept.