Nue

Every night at the dead hour of the ox, a knot of black smoke gathered over the roof of the imperial palace in Kyoto, and out of it came a cry. It was not quite a bird and not quite a beast, a thin wavering call that carried across the sleeping city and set the palace guards’ skin crawling. The young emperor heard it from his bed in the Seiryōden and shook, and by morning he was sick in a way no physician could name. Incense burned through the halls, priests chanted against the dark, and still the cloud returned the next night, and the cry with it, and the sickness sank deeper into him.

The thing inside the cloud was the nue. The old accounts build it out of spare parts, and no two of them quite agree. The Tale of the Heike gives it the face of a monkey, the body of a tanuki, the legs and paws of a tiger, and a snake for a tail, a living seam of animals that were never meant to meet. The Genpei Jōsuiki, telling the same night’s events, hands it a cat’s head, a chicken’s trunk, a tiger’s back, a tanuki’s limbs and a fox’s tail instead. What survives every version is the sense of wrongness, a creature assembled from the wrong pieces, and the voice.

The name came before the monster. A nue was first a bird, a drab night-singing thrush whose call rises and falls in a lonely quaver that country people heard as a warning of illness and bad luck. The chimera took the bird’s eerie cry, and with the cry it took the bird’s name, until the thrush itself had to be renamed the toratsugumi so the two could be told apart. In a sense the creature is the sound before it is ever the shape. Long before anyone drew its tangled body, what frightened people about the nue was hearing it out in the dark and being unable to see what was making the noise.

When medicine and prayer had both failed, the court turned to a bow. Minamoto no Yorimasa was an aging warrior with a reputation as the finest archer of his age, and the work of killing whatever haunted the palace fell to him. He took a single retainer, a strong man named Ino Hayata, and waited in the palace grounds for the black cloud to come. It came, on schedule, curling up over the roof with its cry. Yorimasa fitted an arrow tipped with a head handed down from his ancestor Minamoto no Yorimitsu and fletched with the tail feathers of a mountain pheasant, murmured a short prayer to the war god Hachiman, and loosed it up into the smoke.

A shriek answered from inside the cloud, and the nue dropped out of it and struck the ground. Ino Hayata was on the creature before it could gather itself, pinning it down and running it through. An arrow ended it. When they brought torches close, the light fell across the tangle of monkey and tiger and serpent, and the emperor, the story says, was well again by dawn. Yorimasa received a famous sword called Shishiō, the Lion King, for that night’s work, and the killing of the nue became one of the proudest tales his family owned.

The body was its own difficulty. The dead nue was sealed inside a hollowed-out boat and pushed out onto the river to be carried away from the capital, the way a sickness is sent downstream rather than buried among the living. Where the boat finally ran aground, people heaped a mound of earth over the thing and called it the Nue-zuka, the nue’s grave. More than one such mound is still pointed out, in Kyoto and in Osaka, low humps of ground that keep an impossible animal tethered to a real place.

By the Edo period the nue had passed out of terror and into the picture-books. Toriyama Sekien set it among his hundred demons in the eighteenth century and filed it, dryly, as a bird-beast, remarking only that it was named for its thrush-like call. Later artists came back again and again to the composite body and the coil of the snake tail, and the word nue drifted into everyday speech as a name for anything shifty and hard to place, a person whose true nature cannot be made out.

Its power was never in tooth or claw. The nue worked through the air and the dark, folding itself into a cloud of black smoke that let it drift unseen over the palace, and what it carried down in that smoke was fever, foul dreams, and a dread no bolt or prayer could shut out. It struck at the single point where a whole realm was most exposed, the body of its emperor, and it did the harm from above and out of reach. That reach was also its undoing. For all the plague it could pour onto a sleeping court, the nue had a body, and a body can be hit. One archer who held his nerve, one true arrow into the smoke, and the terror of the capital came down like any shot bird, to be pinned by a single strong man and hauled off in a boat. It could sicken an emperor from the clouds, but it could not survive being seen and struck.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Nue?

The Nue is a chimera of Japanese folklore, a composite creature most often described with the head of a monkey, the body of a tanuki (raccoon dog), the limbs of a tiger, and a snake for a tail. It is famous for an eerie, wavering cry like that of the nue thrush and for cloaking itself in a cloud of black smoke. It is best known from the medieval war epic The Tale of the Heike.

What happens in the story of the Nue and Minamoto no Yorimasa?

In The Tale of the Heike, a Nue appeared each night as a black cloud over the imperial palace in Kyoto and made the emperor gravely ill, and neither medicine nor prayer could cure him. The archer Minamoto no Yorimasa was ordered to kill it; he shot an arrow up into the cloud, and his retainer Ino Hayata finished the fallen creature with his sword. The emperor recovered, and Yorimasa was rewarded with a sword called Shishiō, the Lion King.

What does the Nue look like?

The Nue is roughly the size of a large dog and is stitched together from mismatched animals. The Tale of the Heike gives it a monkey’s head, a tanuki’s body, a tiger’s limbs, and a serpent’s tail, while the Genpei Jōsuiki describes a cat’s head, a chicken’s trunk, a tiger’s back, and a fox’s tail. Its unsettling, unnatural mixture of parts is the one constant across the sources.

Why is the Nue linked to sickness and bad luck?

The Nue was believed to bring illness, nightmares, and misfortune, and in its most famous tale it strikes the emperor himself with a wasting sickness from within a cloud of smoke. Its very name comes from a night-singing thrush whose call was heard as an omen of disease, so the sound of the creature was itself considered a warning.

What is a Nue-zuka?

A Nue-zuka is a “Nue mound,” a burial site said to hold the remains of the slain creature. In the legend the dead Nue was sealed in a hollow boat and set adrift, and where it came ashore a mound was raised over it. Several such mounds are still identified today, including ones in Kyoto and Osaka.

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