Long-Nosed Goblin of the Mountains
The classic daitengu has a scarlet face and a towering nose, dresses like a yamabushi mountain ascetic, walks on single-toothed geta, and carries a feather fan that can raise gales; it roosts in ancient cryptomeria high in the mountains. Its lesser kin, the karasu-tengu, keep a crow's beak and wings. Every famous peak has its own great tengu, such as Sojobo of Mount Kurama, Tarobo of Mount Atago, and Jirobo of Mount Hira, and a folk text known as the Tengu Sutra lists forty-eight of them by mountain and name.
The word itself is Chinese, originally naming an ominous meteor, the 'celestial dog.' The Nihon Shoki records that in 637 a great star crossed the sky from east to west with a sound like thunder, and the monk Min, trained in China, identified it as a tengu. From the Heian period the creature moved into Buddhist lore: arrogant monks were said to fall after death into the 'tengu realm,' and the Konjaku Monogatarishu tells of tengu impersonating Buddhas and carrying off priests. The Muromachi noh play Kurama Tengu has the great tengu of Mount Kurama teach swordsmanship to the boy Ushiwakamaru, the future Minamoto no Yoshitsune, fixing Kurama as the cult's chief holy ground.
In village belief tengu explained mountain strangeness: children lost to 'spiriting away,' phantom tree-felling heard at night, stones flung from nowhere. The red long-nosed mask remains the face of the uncanny mountain.
