Sarugami

On the seventh day the drums went quiet. In the villages under Nakayama, in old Mimasaka province, that silence meant a girl had been chosen, and everyone kept indoors while she was carried up the mountain. They sealed her inside a plain chest of unpainted cedar and left it before the altar of the shrine among the tall trees, and then they went back down and did not look back. By morning the chest stood open and empty, and the fields were safe for another year. Whatever came out of the dark to lift that lid was, the priests insisted, the god of the mountain.

It was a monkey.

The word sarugami means precisely that, monkey god, and the contradiction packed into those two syllables is the whole of the creature. In the deepest layer of Japanese belief the monkey genuinely was close to divine. At the Hie and Hiyoshi shrines clustered around Mount Hiei, the saru is the messenger and living avatar of Sannō, the mountain king, and of Ōyamakui, the kami of the peak. The sound of the word helped: saru chimes with masaru, to excel and to win, and with the phrase for driving evil away, so the monkey became a queller of demons, a guardian of safe childbirth and good marriages. People still buy small red monkey charms at those shrines to turn misfortune aside. That is the benign face, and it is old and well attested.

The other face is the one the villagers of Mimasaka met. The folklorist Yanagita Kunio had a name for what happened in between. Sarugami, he argued, are fallen gods, spirits that were once worshipped and then, as the belief that fed them thinned and soured, slid down into monsters. The offerings stopped being gifts and became ransom. The god that had guarded the mountain began to eat the people who lived on it, and still expected to be thanked.

The oldest full telling is in the Konjaku Monogatari-shū, the great twelfth-century collection of tales. In its version a giant monkey at Nakayama has held a district in fear for generations, taking a young woman every year under threat of storms that would beat down the rice. One year a hunter passing through hears of the coming sacrifice and offers to take the girl’s place. He climbs into the cedar chest with two of his fiercest dogs and a short blade, and lets himself be carried up and set down in the black interior of the shrine. When the lid lifts and the huge shape leans in, he looses the dogs. They fasten on the monkey before it can cry out, and the hunter sets his knife to its throat and holds it there while it thrashes. The thing that had passed for a god for a hundred years begs, in the end, for its life.

A whole family of stories grew from that shape, and Japanese folklorists gather them under a single heading, the destroying of the monkey god. The most beloved is the tale of Shippeitaro. A wandering warrior sleeping in a mountain shrine wakes at midnight to a troop of monkeys dancing and howling in a ring, and in their song he catches a warning they keep repeating to one another, that whatever they do, Shippeitaro must never find out. He goes looking and learns that Shippeitaro is a dog, kept in Nagahama in Ōmi province. He borrows the dog, hides it in the sacrificial chest in place of the doomed girl, and waits. When the monkeys throw back the lid expecting a feast, the dog comes out of the box like something fired from it, and the warrior’s sword finishes what the dog begins. Andrew Lang put a version into his Violet Fairy Book in 1901, which is how many readers outside Japan first met the story, though the tale had been collected long before he reached it.

What the monkey actually looks like shifts from telling to telling, because the horror was never really in its body. It is an ape of unnatural size, sometimes a lone giant with a rain-soaked coat and long yellow teeth, sometimes the leader of a chattering troop, sometimes a presence that has crept inside the shrine itself and speaks through its priest. It can wear the shape and the authority of a true mountain god so completely that no one thinks to question the arrangement. That is its real weapon, and its worst one.

Its powers follow from the mask. Sarugami commands the weather that matters to farmers, the wind and rain and blight that can starve a valley, and it uses them as leverage rather than as mere punishment. It can take possession of a shrine and its keeper, so that the demand for a victim comes down in the god’s own voice. It knows how to make extortion look like piety. Against all of that stands one old and reliable enemy. Dogs undo it. The monkey and the dog are set against each other throughout the Japanese bestiary, and in tale after tale it is the hound, hidden in the box or loosed in the dark, that tears the false god down. The rest of its undoing needs only a single person willing to climb the mountain, open the chest, and look hard at what has been feeding there.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Sarugami?

Sarugami is a monkey god or monkey spirit of Japanese folklore. The name literally means “monkey god,” and in the oldest belief the monkey was the messenger and avatar of the mountain kami, but in medieval tales Sarugami appears as a malevolent giant monkey that demands human sacrifice while posing as a mountain deity.

Why did Sarugami demand human sacrifices?

Sarugami posed as the god of a mountain and threatened villages with storms and ruined harvests unless they handed over a young woman as tribute, often once a year. The victim was sealed inside a plain wooden chest and left at the shrine, where the monkey devoured her in the night.

How was Sarugami defeated?

Sarugami is almost always killed by dogs. In the Konjaku Monogatari-shū a hunter hid in the sacrifice chest with his hounds and set them on the monkey, and in the Shippeitaro tales a wandering warrior learns that the monkeys fear a dog named Shippeitaro from Nagahama in Ōmi province and substitutes that dog for the maiden.

Is Sarugami good or evil?

Both, depending on the source. As the sacred monkey of the Hie and Hiyoshi shrines, Sarugami wards off evil and protects childbirth and marriage, while in folktales it is a man-eating monster wearing the mask of a god. The folklorist Yanagita Kunio explained the contradiction by calling such beings “fallen gods,” once worshipped and later degraded into yokai.

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