Tengu-no-kakuremino

The flask tipped itself. In a sake shop in Fukui a tokkuri leaned over, poured, and set itself upright again; a cup lifted off the counter, emptied, and came back down; chopsticks went into a dish and the fish was gone. The customers went over their own heels getting away from the table. Somewhere in that room a man stood stark naked and grey to the hairline with cold hearth ash, working steadily through their supper, and for several minutes not one of them could prove it.

The thing that began all this was a raincoat.

A mino is not a costume. It is working gear: rice straw or sedge gathered into overlapping courses and bound tight, thatch for a body instead of a roof, tied at the shoulders and hanging shaggy to the knee. Wet, it smells of the field. Dry, it scratches. Farmers wore them, ferrymen wore them, anyone who had to be outdoors in weather wore them, and a worn-out one was worth precisely nothing. The kakuremino is that garment with one alteration, which is that the person underneath it cannot be seen.

It belongs to the tengu, the long-nosed beings who hold the high ridges and are not to be crossed there. Above the hamlet of Hata in Chizu, in Tottori, there was a mountain nobody would climb, because everyone knew that whoever went up would be picked off the slope and flung from the peak. In October 1979 a woman born in 1907 sat down and told a collector what happened when a man climbed it anyway.

He was a gambler and he had lost. Not partly: he had been stripped down to his loincloth, and in the Fukui version of the same story he had already pawned his wife’s kimono to raise the stake. Since he could not go home and could not be seen on the road, he went up the forbidden mountain instead, sat down astride the tengu’s rock, and got out the only property he had left, which was a die. He rolled it. “Osaka. Osaka. I can see Osaka.” He picked it up and rolled it again. “Edo now. Edo.” Then Kyoto. He kept this up, delighted with himself, alone on a peak, until the tengu came out to see what the noise was and asked whether the thing really showed those places.

The Fukui telling sharpens the joke to a point. There the gambler is not performing at all; he is simply calling his throws, chō and han, odds and evens, and the tengu mishears them as Kyō and Han, Kyoto and Osaka, and asks in good faith whether the little cube can show him the two great cities. The gambler, who has never in his life let an opening go by, explains that it is a most curious object which shows you what you wish to see, or does not, according to its whim, and that this is exactly what makes it impossible to put down. The tengu offers his cloak of hiding for it. In Tottori he throws in the hat as well. The trade is made, and the man is off the mountain without looking back, and behind him a mountain god is turning a gambling die over in his fingers waiting for Kyoto to appear in it.

What follows is not a hero’s career. He works by day and at night he puts the cloak on and walks into the taverns, and the sake warmers empty themselves, one after another, and the food goes off the dishes. In Fukui he adds the bun shop to his rounds. Nobody in any version of the story ever uses this cloak for anything but appetite.

The cloak has no origin. No one says who wove it, or when, or why a mountain spirit should need rain gear at all. It simply exists in the tengu’s possession, one of a small class of Japanese wonders that turn up heaped on the treasure ship of the Seven Lucky Gods at New Year, alongside the inexhaustible purse, the lucky mallet and the feather robe. The hiding cloak and the hiding hat sit in that pile as household luck, drawn on lacquer boxes and printed on New Year pictures, thoroughly domesticated, which is a strange fate for a thing whose only recorded use is theft.

Its end is always the same and always domestic. A woman opens the chest, finds a filthy torn straw cape stuffed in among the clothes, says something short about the state of it, and burns it. In Tottori she is the mother of the house and she burns the hat with it. In Fukui she is the wife and she feeds it into the kamado. In the Hikoichi telling, where a mischievous young man wins the cape by peering through a plain length of bamboo and shouting that he can see towns a hundred miles off, it is his mother, and by the time he reaches the fire the thing is already ash. It is straw, and straw burns.

But not entirely. The gambler, standing over a cold kamado full of the wreck of his fortune, scoops up a handful of ash in despair, and his hands vanish. So he strips and coats himself, every inch, and goes out grey and invisible into the evening, and this is where the story stops being about a cloak and starts being about the limits of a coating. On the road he needs to relieve himself. The wet washes one small patch clean. He does not notice. He arrives at the sake shop, the flasks begin to empty themselves, the room empties too, and then somebody peering from a safe distance sees the one bare bobbing thing that ash no longer covers, works out that it is not a tengu at all but a neighbour, and calls the others back. In Tottori they tie him up. In Fukui they kick and punch him the length of the road home.

Its powers are small, exact and complete: total concealment of the body while worn, transferable to ash, and requiring nothing of the wearer, no spell, no virtue, no payment. Its weaknesses are the same list read backwards. It conceals the wearer and not what he does, so a floating cup gives him away as surely as a face would. It looks like refuse and is therefore always destroyed by someone tidying up. Its ashes wash off. And it grants no wisdom whatsoever to the person under it, which is why the tale is filed among the humorous tales, the exaggeration stories, under the heading of the hiding cloak and hat, and not among the tales of gods.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Tengu-no-kakuremino?

The Tengu-no-kakuremino is a straw rain-cape belonging to the tengu in Japanese folklore that makes its wearer invisible. A mino is an ordinary farmer’s raincoat of bound rice straw, and this one is always described as old, dirty and torn. In some tellings it comes as a pair with the kakuregasa, a matching hat of invisibility.

How does a human get the tengu’s cloak of invisibility?

By cheating the tengu with a worthless object. In the Tottori and Fukui versions a ruined gambler sits on the tengu’s rock rolling a die and calling out the names of distant cities, and the tengu, believing the die shows far-off places, trades the cloak for it. In the Hikoichi version the trick object is a plain length of bamboo the young man peers through while shouting about the towns he can see.

Does the kakuremino still work after it is burned?

Yes. In the Tottori and Fukui tellings a woman of the house mistakes the filthy cape for rubbish and burns it, and when the owner scoops up the ashes in despair his hands disappear. He strips and coats his whole body in ash to go on using it. The ash works exactly as the cloak did, with one difference: it washes off.

How is the wearer of the kakuremino always caught?

By something the concealment does not cover. Ash-covered and invisible, the gambler stops to relieve himself on the way to the sake shop and washes one patch of himself clean without noticing; the drinkers, watching flasks and cups empty themselves, spot the single uncovered part bobbing through the room and realise they are dealing with a man rather than a tengu. He is tied up in one version and beaten in another.

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Tengu, Daitengu, Karasu-tengu, Konoha-tengu, Guhin, Tsukumogami, Kasa-obake, Bakezōri, Maneki-neko, Tanuki, Kitsune, Kappa, Amanojaku, Perseus