Basan

Also Known As: 波山; also Basabasa, 婆娑婆娑, after the sound of its wings, and Inuhōō, 犬鳳凰, “dog phoenix”
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It breathes a bright fire that carries no heat and sets nothing alight, and it is gone from the yard before anyone gets the door open.
Role in Mythos: It belongs to no story cycle and meets no god or hero; it is the entire content of one short entry in an 1841 picture-book of strange tales.
Relation to Humans: It comes down out of the hills after dark, beats at the doors of mountain houses, and vanishes when they are opened. Nothing in the record has it hurting anyone, though the name basabasa no bake was used in the Iyo hills to frighten children.

Somewhere in the mountains of Iyo, a door rattles after midnight. The sound is dry and papery, a basa-basa of something beating against the wood, and when the householder lifts the bar there is nobody in the yard. That is very nearly the whole of it. Everything anyone knows about the basan comes from a single Edo-period book, the *Ehon Hyaku Monogatari*, published in 1841 under the alternate title *Tōsanjin Yawa*, its text written by a man calling himself Tōsanjin and its pictures cut by Takehara Shunsensai.

The picture is the better half of the record. A huge fowl stands among bamboo with its beak open and fire coming out of it, the comb on its head heavy and scarlet, the stalks around it lit from below. The line of text beside the image says only that the creature is born in the deep thickets, that it breathes fire from its mouth without stopping, and that it flies about night after night. Ten words of Japanese, and a bird nobody has otherwise reported.

The fire is the strange part, and Tōsanjin takes the trouble to deflate it. What comes out of the beak, he says, is no more than the breath of a fox: kitsunebi, the pale corpse-light that drifts over fields and burns nothing it touches. It looks like flame. It does not behave like flame. Hold a hand in it and there is no warmth, and the bamboo it plays across is not so much as scorched.

The name came from the wings rather than the fire. In ordinary speech the thing was called basabasa, which is simply the noise, and in the mountains of Iyo *basabasa no bake*, the basabasa monster, was what adults said to children who would not settle. Tōsanjin passes on the anecdote that gives the name its edge: late at night something knocks and clatters at the gate of a mountain house, over and over, and the door is opened onto an empty yard. That happened often enough, he writes, to be worth writing down.

For the body he has almost nothing, and he says so. He quotes an essay by a certain Tachibana, whom he does not further identify and whom nobody since has managed to trace, to the effect that the basabasa resembles a domestic fowl but is large. That is the only measurement the creature will ever get. He also records a second name, inuhōō, “dog phoenix,” and admits in the same breath that he cannot say whether it refers to this bird or to something else.

Nothing else survives. There is no account of where the basan came from, no first sighting, no myth in which somebody hunts it, kills it, is cursed by it, or gets anything useful out of it. It has no season, no rival, no shrine. It knocks, and it goes.

What it does have is a plausible ancestor, and this is a modern reading rather than anything the 1841 text claims. Terajima Ryōan’s encyclopedia *Wakan Sansai Zue*, finished in 1712, carries an entry for the shokkakei, the “fire-eating fowl,” which is the cassowary: a bird like a chicken, said to eat half-burnt wood. Tada Katsumi, who edited the annotated modern edition of the *Ehon Hyaku Monogatari*, proposed that the basan was assembled out of that entry, a foreign bird with a fiery reputation reshaped into a monster of the Shikoku hills. It is worth being clear about which bird eats embers. The cassowary does. The basan’s own record says nothing whatever about what it eats.

Its powers, such as they are, follow from that thinness. It produces light without heat and noise without a body, and it withdraws faster than a human eye can turn. Its limits follow from the same place. The fire cannot burn a house down or warm a room. The bird cannot be caught, because it is never actually seen, and it cannot be driven off, because it has already left. Whatever the villagers of Iyo were hearing in the bamboo at two in the morning, the book that preserved it never claimed to have seen it either.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Basan?

The Basan is a fire-breathing bird from Japanese folklore, described as an oversized chicken with a bright red comb. It appears in a single Edo-period source, the *Ehon Hyaku Monogatari* of 1841, which places it in the mountains of Iyo Province, now Ehime Prefecture on the island of Shikoku.

Is the Basan’s fire dangerous?

No. The book that records the Basan states plainly that its fire is the same order of thing as kitsunebi, fox-fire, which gives off no heat and ignites nothing. The flame is a glow shaped like fire rather than fire itself.

Why is the Basan called Basabasa?

Basabasa is the sound of the bird’s wings beating, and it was the creature’s ordinary name in common speech. In the Iyo mountains the phrase basabasa no bake, the basabasa monster, was used to frighten children into behaving.

Does the Basan eat embers or charcoal?

Not according to any source that actually records the Basan. The ember-eating belongs to the shokkakei, the cassowary, described in Terajima Ryōan’s 1712 encyclopedia *Wakan Sansai Zue*, which the folklorist Tada Katsumi suggested was the model the Basan was built from. The two have been conflated since.

What happens if you see a Basan?

Nothing, because you do not. The one anecdote attached to the creature has it rattling at the door of a mountain house late at night, and the door being opened onto an empty yard. No source records it attacking, injuring, or even confronting anyone.