Konoha-tengu

The konoha-tengu, «leaf tengu», is not a grade within a ladder: it is one of the names Edo Japan gave to the lesser tengu, the same creature other districts called karasu-tengu or kotengu. It appears too as sakaidori, «bird of the boundary», and as koppa-tengu, «splinter tengu». What the name evokes is something plentiful and light, leaves that the wind drags by the handful, and that is precisely the opposite of the single sovereign figure of the great tengu. The texts that record him are miscellanies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, accounts of provincial oddities and the diaries of literate men, not religious scripture nor ancient chronicle. The konoha-tengu enters the written record as a creature somebody reports having seen, not as a doctrinal category, and that difference of origin explains nearly everything else known about him.

The standard description comes from the Shokoku Rijindan, the collection of provincial hearsay that Kikuoka Senryō published in 1743. In the province of Suruga, over the Ōi River, large birds were said to be seen at night with wings like a kite's, some six shaku across, close to a metre eighty, with a face of almost human features, a beak, a tail, and hands and feet of five fingers. They took fish in quantity, and at the least sign of a human presence they fled. That is the konoha-tengu the sources give: a winged, elusive, nocturnal creature whose skill is not martial but that of a river fisher. None of them credits him with mastery of the sword, nor the chanting of sutras, nor the mudras of shugendō. What he is granted is flight, an aim over dark water, and extreme wariness of men.

His place among his own is fixed by the Kasshi Yawa, the diary Matsura Seizan began one night in 1821 and continued until his death in 1841. There it is said that the konoha-tengu held a very low rank in the world of the tengu, and earned his keep selling firewood and carrying the loads of those who climbed the mountain, to raise funds for the greater tengu. He is no master: he is the underling who works for the lord of the summit. His ties are therefore of two kinds and only two. Upward, service: he obeys the great tengu who commands his mountain. Sideways, identity: the karasu-tengu is his very class under another image, and the distance between the two names is one of picture and district, not of hierarchy. Kawanabe Kyōsai drew them wheeling in a flock over Akiba-san, and that is how tradition conceives them: never one, always many.

It is common to read that the tengu rises through grades: bestial karasu-tengu, ascetic konoha-tengu, sovereign daitengu. That progression appears in no source of the period. It is a modern ordering, spread in the twentieth century by illustrated yōkai compendia and by the encyclopaedias and games that drew on them, and it consists of taking regional names for one class and lining them up as rungs. Tradition splits in two, and not by seniority but by what the man was before he died: the proud with wisdom becomes a great tengu; the proud without it remains a lesser one. Of the same order is the ascription of young Minamoto no Yoshitsune's training on Mount Kurama: the one who instructs him in the legend is Sōjōbō, the great tengu of that mountain, not a konoha-tengu. It is worth saying, because the yamabushi habit, the tokin cap and the horagai conch belong to the image of the great tengu, and hanging them on the lesser one inverts exactly what the sources say.