Taimatsumaru

Also Known As: 松明丸, “torch maru”; understood as a form of tengubi, tengu fire, also called tengu no gyorō, the tengu’s fishing
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Elementals
Mythical Attributes: A self-carrying fire that flies, burning without consuming what it clings to and without setting the forest alight.
Role in Mythos: Toriyama Sekien gave it the job of interfering with religious practice, making it one more instrument of the tengu’s long war on Buddhist concentration.
Relation to Humans: It is met by people out after dark in mountain country, where it is taken as something to hide from rather than something to approach. Those who watch it are said to sicken, lose their way, or in the worst tellings be carried off the mountain entirely.

The cedars above the pass go black an hour before the valley does, and it is in that hour that the light appears. It comes down through the branches without touching them, red at the centre and paler at the edge, moving at about the speed of a walking man. Anyone still on the path smells resin and cold stone and then, faintly, something scorched. The light is not a lantern. Nobody is carrying it.

Toriyama Sekien gave that light a body and a name. In 1784, four years before he died, he published Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro, the last of the four illustrated yokai books that made him the most copied monster artist in Japan, and on one of its pages he set a bird alight. The creature flies with its wings out and fire pouring from beak and talons, the flame moving with it rather than eating it. He called it Taimatsumaru. Taimatsu is a pine torch. Maru is the ending Japanese gives to boys’ childhood names, to famous swords, to ships and to certain tengu, so the name turns a phenomenon into somebody. A light in the trees becomes a person with a temper.

Sekien wrote a single line beneath the picture, and the line does not sound like a man reporting a legend. Though it bears the name of a torch, he says, this may be the light that comes from the stones of the tengu-tsubute, which make their home in the cedar tops of deep mountains and hidden valleys. Then he adds the phrase he attaches to nearly everything in that book: or so I thought, within a dream. The whole volume is framed as the record of a strange dream, and that framing is now read as Sekien’s own signature on his own inventions. He was not recording a belief. He was making one up, and he said so.

He was not making it out of nothing. The burning figure appears to have been lifted from an older source, a flaming creature found in the Tokyo National Museum line of the medieval Night Parade of a Hundred Demons scrolls and absent from the better known Shinju-an version. Sekien seems to have come across an anonymous shape in a painted procession, decided what it was, and written it a caption. The shell demon Sazae-oni arrived on another page of the same book by the same route.

The stones he points at are the older and the better attested thing. Tengu-tsubute are pebbles that arrive from nowhere in the mountains, rattling down through branches, drumming on the roof of a hut, pattering across a path with nothing above it but sky. Haikai poets were already using the phrase by 1633, when Chikashige wrote of hail beating the leaves and wondered whether it was tengu-tsubute. Being struck was thought to bring on illness. Meeting the thing at all was thought to ruin a hunter’s luck for the season. It belonged to a whole family of mountain sounds without causes, alongside tengu-daoshi, the crash of an enormous tree falling where afterwards no tree has fallen, and tengu-warai, laughter rolling off an empty slope. Sekien’s guess was that the stones glowed, and that the glow was what people had been calling a torch.

In Aichi and Shizuoka, in Yamanashi and Kanagawa, the same fire had a plainer job. Villagers called it tengubi and watched it come down off the ridges to the rivers after dark, one flame or two at first, then dividing and dividing again until several hundred small red lights hung above the water, drifting as though being dealt out by hand, before gathering themselves and going back up the mountain. It was the work of the kawa tengu, the river tengu, and it was a fishing lamp: tengu no gyorō, the tengu’s night catch. Seeing it was the danger. People who saw it fell sick, and a farmer caught in the open when it came would go flat into the paddy mud and lay a sandal over the back of his head and wait it out, because what he wanted to avoid was its attention rather than its heat.

Around Kasugai the stories run both ways. One man, benighted in the hills in a sudden thunderstorm, too cold to move and too blind to find the road, sat under a tree while the strange fires gathered around him, and found that they warmed him through and lit his way home. Another, a young man who had decided the whole business was village nonsense, walked out of his door on a night the fires were burning and shouted at them to come and take him if they could. Something large and black came out of the dark, picked him up and went away over the mountain with him. He was not seen again.

What Sekien did with all of this was quietly clever. He kept the fire and threw away the fish. In his version the light is not a lamp for catching anything, it is there to spoil religious practice, to break the concentration of men trying to hold a sutra in their heads on a dark mountain. That is the oldest work tengu do. The Konjaku Monogatarishū, assembled in the late Heian period, is thick with them showing false Buddhas to the devout, lifting monks out of their temples and setting them down in distant provinces, coming at holy men from every angle except a straight one. The Tengu Scrolls of 1296 made them the mirror held up to arrogant clergy, beaked and winged and looking uncomfortably like the priests they mocked, and tengudō was understood as the road proud monks travelled after death. Against an enemy of that kind a light is a good weapon. It never has to touch anyone.

Its powers are all of that one narrow sort. It burns without being burnt and without taking the cedars with it. It goes where nothing on foot can follow, it divides itself into hundreds, and it makes familiar country unreadable, so that a man who has walked a pass for thirty years cannot say which way it lies. It is bright enough to be mistaken for help.

The limits are just as narrow. It has no hands. The fall, the fever, the lost road are all things a person does to himself while looking at it, which is why the old advice amounts to keeping your eyes down and your door shut. Daylight finishes it. And there is a last limitation that no charm addresses, which is that the creature with the beak and the burning talons has only ever existed on one page of one book, drawn by a man who admitted in the same breath that he had dreamt it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Taimatsumaru?

Taimatsumaru is a flaming bird yokai from Japanese folklore, created by the artist Toriyama Sekien for his 1784 book Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro. Its name combines taimatsu, a pine torch, with maru, the suffix Japanese attaches to boys’ names, swords and ships. It is treated as a form of tengubi, the tengu fire seen in Japanese mountain country.

Is Taimatsumaru an ancient Japanese legend?

No. The named creature is an Edo-period invention: Sekien drew it in 1784 and framed the entire book as the record of a dream, which is now taken as his way of signing his own inventions. The fire behind it is genuinely old, since tengu-tsubute was already a poetic commonplace by 1633 and tengubi was reported across several Japanese provinces, but nobody was telling stories about a bird called Taimatsumaru before Sekien painted one.

What does Taimatsumaru do to people?

In Sekien’s account it interferes with religious practice, breaking the concentration of anyone trying to chant or meditate on a dark mountain. In the regional folklore that lies underneath it, people who saw the tengu fire were said to fall ill, and villagers would drop flat and cover their heads rather than be noticed by it. One Kasugai story has a young man who taunted the lights carried off over the mountain and never seen again.

What is tengu-tsubute, and how is it connected?

Tengu-tsubute is the mountain phenomenon of stones flying out of nowhere, striking huts and paths with no one there to throw them, and it was blamed on tengu. Sekien’s caption guesses that Taimatsumaru is really the light given off by those stones, which is how he ties a burning bird to a much older belief. It sits alongside tengu-daoshi, the sound of a great tree falling where no tree has fallen, and tengu-warai, laughter from an empty hillside.

Why is Taimatsumaru drawn as a bird?

Sekien appears to have taken the flaming figure from a medieval Night Parade of a Hundred Demons scroll in the Tokyo National Museum line, then given the borrowed shape a name and a caption. Tengu themselves were long depicted as birds of prey with beaks and wings, so a burning raptor sits naturally in their company. No folk account describes the body of a taimatsumaru, because what people reported seeing was only ever a light.