Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/238

 glaring eyes, a flat nose, broadly expanding nostrils, three-fingered hands and three-toed feet, long silvery talons, and wearing nothing but a girdle of tiger skin. He has all the ferocity and all the malignity proper to his kind. He takes his pastime when on earth in the depths of forests and the caverns of remote mountains, lives there on human flesh, and carries off beautiful women to share his orgies. In the ninth century he began to be a prominent figure in Japanese imagination, and his doings since that era are recorded in a library of startling records too voluminous to be opened here.

There is another genus of demon that deserves notice as being essentially an outcome of Japanese fancy. It is the tengu, generally imagined as a monster of huge stature and enormous strength, with the body of a man and the face and wings of a bird. The tengu is one of the most mysterious of Japanese monsters. The ideographs with which the name is written signify "heavenly dog." One tradition says that, in the year 638 A. D. the Emperor Jomei gave the name tengu to a meteor which flashed from east to west with a loud detonation. Another and more venerable account alleges that the tengu were emanations from the excessive ardour of the "Impetuous Male Deity" (Susa-no-o); that they were female demons, with human bodies, beasts' heads, vast ears, noses so long that they could hang men on them and fly a thousand miles without feeling the