Modern Myths: The Tengu

The Tengu: braggart. goblin.
Elsewhere in Japan: a once-winged demon that would carry you off in the woods.
Here, In Furubira, a beneficent (if irritable) spirit who brings catches and harvests aplenty.

That red skin, white hair, and suggestive nose: all so clearly constructed, so impossibly implausible…
…yet.
Something in his movements gives the impression this is more than costume: that this might, more accurately, be a man possessed.

Even the lions that attend him—the ones I can clearly see my high school students puppetting—the clack of their wooden jaws gives me shivers, and they seem to flow too smoothly around the Tengu in the fire light.

In the town of Furubira, the people honour a mythical Japanese creature known as the Tengu. In days long-passed, Tengu were bird-men or dog-men, best equated with our ideas of goblins or demons. Today the people of Furubira worship a beneficent incarnation of the Tengu; summoning him bi-annually to bless their catches and their harvests. The sons of town officials or the relatives of important business men are asked to don the red robes of the Tengu: to study the wild, dance-like gait of the character, and to practice the controlled teeter that goes along with its stilt-like geta.

©Photo Copyright Ross Cole-Hunter/Pekoism

But, despite the red wooden mask and the white, horse-hair wig; despite the vermilion robes and the alabaster gloves, the Tengu is not a man in a costume.

The Tengu is a man possessed.

Sure, the tradition started as a dramatic attempt to only emulate long-gone mythical creatures. The man behind the mask became the player, and the whole town, his stage. However, emulation is a dangerous practice. One can only emulate something so closely before one’s identity outside the emulation begins to shift and give, losing more of the original self and taking on more of that which you emulate.

The process is even more perilous when that which you try to emulate was once a god.

To better emulate its movements, the man behind the Tengu mask puts himself in the place of the Tengu, lending it not only his body but also his mind. It is a willing possession: a man of flesh and blood inviting a creature of the ether—a creature of Myth—to inhabit him for the length of the festival. I can’t help believing that such a process must leave something behind; that the thing which walks out of the great bonfire at the culmination of the festival might, somehow, be cardinally different from the man who walked in. The town officials change the man behind the mask regularly, as if to spread around the honour. But could they, instead, be doing so to keep that man from taking on too much of the Tengu?

Though some may take the term “mythical creature” to be synonymous with “non-existent creature,” the reality is that the term indicates a creature that exists in myth—making its home in story and sustaining itself on belief. In our modern, empirical world, where all that can exist is that which you can touch, hold, and trade, mythical existence is relegated to a lower level of being—far removed from the things that we allow to bare consequence on our lives.

But that which lives can also die, and that which is material will crumble and fade.

All the while, myth and memory and story live on.

If things like the Tengu only ever existed in imagination and belief, is it not the case that they exist still—that as soon as one remembers them, these entities live again? By paying tithe to the Tengu twice every year; by giving it physical form in the act of lending it a body; do the people of Furubira not make the creature more alive than the once-real-and-now-very-much-dead former emperors of this land?

©Photo Copyright Ross Cole-Hunter/Pekoism