Mikoshi-nyudo

◆ The legend

On a night road or a slope, a monk is standing in front of you. You look up to see who it is, and the more you look up, the taller he grows, until he's a towering giant whose head you can't see even with your neck bent all the way back. That's how the mikoshi-nyudo is described. Some stories say that if you keep looking up, you'll end up toppling over backward. But, as people in many places tell it, if you stay calm and call out "Mikoshita!" ("I've seen over you!") or "I've seen through you!", he simply vanishes.

The tale often goes that he's really a tanuki, a fox, or a weasel in disguise. In the Edo period he was drawn by Toriyama Sekien in his Gazu Hyakki Yagyo, and in illustrated storybooks called kusazoshi he often showed up as a kind of boss of the monsters. He's frightening, yet once you see through him, he's gone. There's something fun about him, like a battle of wits between people and monsters.