Karasu-tengu

The karasu-tengu is the tengu with a bird's head: humanoid body, wings, claws and a raptor's beak, halfway between man and crow or kite. It is the shape in which the lesser tengu, the kotengu, is depicted, and it is worth saying at once that konoha-tengu, "leaf tengu", is another name for that same class and not a separate rung: when Inoue Enryō ordered the material in his Tenguron, at the end of the nineteenth century, he distinguished only two categories, the great daitengu and the small konoha-tengu that dwells in the cryptomerias. The word tengu came from Chinese tiāngǒu, "heavenly dog", and its first Japanese appearance is in book XXIII of the Nihon Shoki (720), where a monk identifies as a tengu the object that crossed the sky with a roar in 637. The reading that prevailed arrived with the Buddhism of the Heian period: the monk who dies proud, learned but unable to give up his vanity, does not reach enlightenment and falls into the tengudō, the way of the tengu, where he is reborn in this figure. Hence the expression "tengu ni naru", to become a tengu, still means in Japanese to grow conceited.

It flies, it has a strength and a sight not of this world, and it moves among the trees at a speed no one can follow. It handles weapons, and above all the sword, in which the tengu pass for masters even among the men who fear them. It raises gusts, leads walkers astray, and three phenomena are laid at its door which mountain villages knew by name: the tengu-kakushi, the "hiding by the tengu", which explained how someone vanished and came back days later dazed and unable to say where he had been; the tengu-tsubute, the rain of stones that fell in the wood with no one to be seen throwing them; and the tengu-daoshi, the crash of a huge tree falling, heard at night, which by morning had felled nothing at all. Possession is also attributed to it. For all that, it is no absolute demon: tradition insists that it respects the true ascetic and that its violence falls on the impious, the arrogant and whoever profanes the forest.

Within the world of the tengu, the karasu-tengu is not an apprentice but a subordinate: the great long-nosed daitengu, such as Sōjōbō of Mount Kurama, command the lesser tengu of their mountain, who serve them as messengers, scouts and troops. The difference between them is not one of seniority but of rank, and that rank was settled when the man each tengu comes from died. Its crow-man figure is fixed by the print: it appears in Toriyama Sekien's Gazu Hyakki Yagyō (1776), which is where the modern Japanese public learned to recognise it, and its stories come from further back, from the twelfth-century Konjaku Monogatarishū, where tengu carry off monks, disguise themselves as the Buddha to deceive the devout, and are unmasked by true holy men. Bound to the mountains and to the cryptomeria woods, the karasu-tengu concentrates the mixture of fear and respect that Japanese folklore holds for the mountain: it is at once the threat that lurks off the path and the guardian who punishes whoever profanes what is sacred.