The Laughter on the Ridge

Yuki Tanabe
Field Correspondent, The Eastern Reaches

Fieldnotes — Mount Kurama, Kyoto Prefecture, early winter

The path up Kurama switches back through cedar so old the bark has gone the colour of wet iron. A shrine keeper I spoke with near the ropeway station told me, without much ceremony, that I should not whistle after dusk. Tengu answer whistling, she said, and once they answer they do not always let you go.

The tengu of this mountain is Sōjōbō, said to be their great king, and the story told locally is that he taught swordsmanship to the young Minamoto no Yoshitsune in these same woods, centuries ago, when the boy was sent to a temple here and found, instead, a teacher with wings folded under a monk's robe. It is one of the gentler tengu stories. Most are not gentle at all.

In the earliest accounts the tengu were not the red-faced, long-nosed figures sold as masks in the temple shops below. They were closer to birds of prey with human cunning, beaked, taloned, and hostile to the Buddhist law they were later recast as guardians of. Monks who grew proud of their learning, who mistook discipline for holiness, were the ones the old sutras warned would be reborn as tengu after death, cursed with their own arrogance made visible. Even now, when the long nose became the standard likeness sometime in the years after, the creature kept its old grudge against pride. A boastful priest, a vain warrior, a hunter too sure of the mountain: these are still the ones the tengu is said to test.

The folklore proper is a catalogue of small uncanny disturbances rather than a single myth. Tengu-tsubute is stones or pinecones thrown from empty air on a mountain trail at night. Tengu-bi is a fire that shows itself high on a ridge with no fuel and no reason. Tengu-warai is laughter, heard from a slope where no one is standing, and travellers in some districts still say that if you hear it you should not laugh back. There is also tengu-kakushi, the old explanation for a child or a woodcutter who vanishes from a village and returns days later, disoriented, sometimes far from where they were lost, with no memory of the interval. Before the word for a simple disappearance existed, this was the word used.

The keeper at Kurama did not treat any of this as decoration. She spoke of the tengu the way a gamekeeper speaks of a wolf that has not been seen this season but has not left either, a fact of the terrain rather than a story about it. She mentioned the feather fan, the habuchiwa, said to summon a wind strong enough to fell a man, and the karasu-tengu, the crow-faced kind, older and less often painted than the long-nosed hanataka-tengu who get the masks and the festival float.

She was less interested in which form was correct than in the fact that the mountain itself was still, in her word, watched. Whether that watching is malice, discipline, or the old debt owed by the proud, the versions disagree, and she did not pretend to settle it for me. I came down before dark, and did not whistle.

Yuki Tanabe is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Eastern Reaches. Shrines, foxes, and the folklore that survives inside cities rather than despite them — the abiding interest is how an old belief adapts to a commuter line, a vending machine, a lit street, and how rarely it simply dies.