Kiyohime

Also Known As: the serpent woman of the Dōjōji legend; nameless in the earliest versions, where she is simply the woman of the house at Manago
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Shapeshifters
Mythical Attributes: A woman whose rage and thwarted love turn her body into an enormous fire-breathing serpent, with no spell, curse or object involved.
Role in Mythos: She is the cautionary heart of the Dōjōji legend, the betrayed lover who hunts a monk to a temple bell and burns him inside it, and who is then released with him by the Lotus Sutra.
Relation to Humans: She was human, and the horror of her story is that nothing supernatural was done to her. She kills exactly one man, the one who lied to her, and the tradition has spent a thousand years arguing about whether she is a monster, a warning to monks, a warning to women, or a victim.

On an autumn day in 929 a boatman on the Hidaka River pretended not to hear a woman shouting at him from the far bank. He had been asked, quietly and urgently, by the young monk he had just ferried across, to carry nobody else. The woman had been running since morning. Her sleeves were heavy with river water and her breath was coming strangely, and after a while she stopped shouting, walked down the shingle, and went into the brown water. What came up the opposite bank was not a woman.

The story begins the way a hundred harmless stories begin. A handsome young pilgrim named Anchin was walking the road south to the great shrine at Kumano, a hundred kilometres beyond Dōjōji, and he stopped for a night at a house in the village of Manago in Kii province. The headman’s daughter looked after him. She fell in love with him within the evening and asked him, without any of the circling a girl was supposed to do, to stay. He would not. She pressed, and he gave her the answer that ruins everything: he promised to come back to her on his way home from Kumano.

He did not come back. He took another road, and she found out from other travellers on the pilgrim route that he had already passed by. She went after him on foot. The Kirime River had no bridge, and the current took her legs out from under her and she crossed it anyway. Near the Kirime shrine she came in sight of him, and he saw her, and he threw down everything he was carrying and ran. In one telling he stood and faced her long enough to tell her she had the wrong man, and prayed to the god of Kumano, and she dropped where she stood. She woke up and understood that she had been lied to twice.

Somewhere around Tsuchino she sat down on a rock to catch her breath, and the breath came out of her red. That is the moment the picture scrolls linger on. Not a curse, not a demon crawling into her, not a bargain with anything. She was simply angry past the point where a body could hold it, and the anger had started to burn its way out.

At the Hidaka she found the boatman waiting with his instructions. She let her outer robe fall and went into the river, and by the time she was swimming she had a serpent’s body under her, and she came ashore below Dōjōji with the water running off her scales.

Anchin, meanwhile, had begged the monks for shelter, and they had done the only thing they could think of: lowered the great bronze bell from its tower and hidden him beneath it. Then they stood about the courtyard and waited for a woman. The serpent came in through the gate and went round the temple four or five times, unhurried, nose down, reading the ground. She had his scent. She knew perfectly well where he was. She wound herself around the bell, struck it with her tail until it rang, and lay there breathing fire on the bronze for half a day, and the metal glowed and the courtyard filled with the smell of hot metal, and when the monks finally levered the bell up there were only some small burnt bones inside.

The story does not end with the killing, and this is the part most retellings drop. A night or two later a monk of Dōjōji dreamed of two serpents. They told him they were Anchin and the woman, that they had become husband and wife in the shape of snakes, and that they were suffering. So the monks of Dōjōji copied out the Lotus Sutra and dedicated the merit of it to them both. That night the monk dreamed again, and the two came to him with the faces of heavenly beings, and told him where they had been reborn, and went their separate ways without a backward look. The Buddhist point is a doctrine called gyakuen, the idea that even a connection made backwards, through sin, can be the thing that carries you out. The version in the twelfth-century Konjaku monogatari shū draws a blunter moral, and Marian Ury’s translation of its closing line still stings: “You see, therefore, the strength of the evil in the female heart.”

She is famous under a name she was not given for another eight hundred years. In the oldest surviving version of the tale, in the Dainihonkoku Hokke genki compiled around 1040, neither the woman nor the monk has a name at all. “Anchin” first turns up in a Buddhist history of the early fourteenth century. “Kiyohime” appears for the first time in a puppet play, Namiki Sōsuke’s Dōjōji genzai uroko, staged in the mid-eighteenth century, and strictly speaking it is not a name but a label: hime, daughter, of Kiyotsugu. The most famous woman in Japanese folklore is a nameless one with a stage credit attached.

The theatre did the rest. The nō play Dōjōji turns the whole legend inside out and stages it at the temple years later, at the rededication of a new bell, from which women have been barred. A travelling shirabyōshi dancer talks her way in, dances to a slow, appalling drum, and drops into the falling bell. When the monks pray it back up she is a serpent, and after a fight she burns in her own fire and sinks into the Hidaka. Puppet theatre and kabuki turned her into an industry; the temple itself lists more than two hundred and fifty works spun off the legend. In Sōsuke’s play she has one extra tooth, the mark of a jealous nature, and when her mother suggests pulling it she refuses, because it is hers and she was born with it.

Dōjōji still tells the story every day. The priests unroll a copy of the medieval Dōjōji engi scrolls for visitors and narrate it aloud, in a picture-sermon called etoki that has been performed there for centuries. And in among the fire and the scales, the temple offers a quiet alternative: perhaps she simply set light to the bell house, and as she circled the burning tower with her wet clothes dragging in the gravel, she only looked like a serpent wound in flame.

Her powers are terrifyingly few and entirely sufficient. She changes shape without instruction, artefact or ritual, on pure feeling; she breathes fire hot enough to soften bronze; she can cross water and track a man by scent; and she is strong enough to crush a bell that a dozen monks strain to lift. Everything she can do, she can only do once she has stopped being human. That is also her limit. She cannot change back. She is turned aside by prayer, knocked flat by the Kumano deity when Anchin thinks to call on it, and finally undone by a chapter of scripture copied out by the same monks who hid him. And she never gets what she wants. She wanted him to keep a promise, and what she got was a mouthful of fire and a river to drown in.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Kiyohime?

Kiyohime is the serpent woman of the Japanese Dōjōji legend, a young woman from the village of Manago in Kii province who fell in love with a travelling monk named Anchin. When he broke his promise to return to her and fled, her rage transformed her into an enormous serpent. She pursued him to Dōjōji temple and burned him to death inside the great bronze bell he was hiding under.

Why did Kiyohime turn into a serpent?

Nothing was done to her. There is no curse, no spell and no demon in the story: she transforms through the sheer force of her own anger and thwarted love. The picture scrolls show it happening in stages during the chase, beginning with her breath coming out as red fire while she rests on a rock, and completing when she plunges into the Hidaka River.

How did Kiyohime kill Anchin?

She tracked him by scent to Dōjōji temple, where the monks had lowered the bell to hide him beneath it. She circled the temple several times, coiled her serpent body around the bell, rang it with her tail, and breathed fire onto the bronze for hours until the metal glowed. When the monks lifted the bell, only small burnt bones remained.

Was Kiyohime always called Kiyohime?

No. In the earliest version of the legend, in the Dainihonkoku Hokke genki of about 1040, the woman and the monk are both nameless. The name Anchin first appears in a Buddhist history of the early fourteenth century, and Kiyohime appears for the first time in Namiki Sōsuke’s puppet play Dōjōji genzai uroko in the mid-eighteenth century, where it is less a name than a description: hime, daughter, of Kiyotsugu.

What happened to Kiyohime after she killed Anchin?

She died, and in most tellings by her own hand in the Hidaka River, and she and Anchin were reborn together as suffering serpents. A monk of Dōjōji dreamed of them, and the temple copied out the Lotus Sutra and dedicated its merit to the pair, which released them both into separate heavens. That release, not the killing, is the original point of the story.