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What do you say we learn about a frog riding, vengeful witch, and a giant skeleton that wants to pop off your head with its teeth and drink your blood? Two different legends, but somehow connected.
Hey, hey, my name is Thersa Matsuura and you’re listening to Uncanny Japan, the podcast where I talk about the lesser known and not so talked about corners of Japan. Be they creepy tales, weird stories, or unusual superstitions. Just about anything I dig up while doing research for my writing. My most recent book, the Book of Japanese Folklore is out and if you felt like giving it a review, I would be forever grateful. There’s also a very handsome Yōkai Oracle Deck out as well, so if you want to connect more to the creatures, wise Japanese words and phrases, and the culture as a whole, that’s for you.
Life for me is still a little chaotic, but I’m going to get back to my posting of episodes every first and third Tuesday, so we don’t have to be lonely anymore. I’ve missed you. I did a poll over on a free Patreon post and I’m going to return to more field recordings and nature sounds, so you can be soothed while listening to me tell you about a monster skeleton who wants to squish you in his bony hands. A shout out and all my love to my patrons and SpectreVision Radio who make this show possible. Okay, let’s find out more about today’s two stars. Takiyasha Hime, a cool sorceress, and the Gashadokuro, a giant blood-loving skeleton.
Speaking of Gashadokuro, I’ve been wanting to do an episode on him ever since once while talking to David Dastmalchian about his awesome comic, Knights vs. Samurai. He mentioned the Gashadokuro and I thought, “Ooh, wouldn’t that be a neat episode?” Also, if you haven’t picked up Knights vs. Samurai, go do it now. It’s a beautiful, exciting story and beautifully illustrated.
So where do I begin? First, I’m working on a book of horror and dark retellings and reimaginings of Japanese lore and some of the more obscure yōkai at the moment, and I’ve been thinking about myths and legends and folk tales a lot. I find it fascinating and entirely wonderful how a very old incident will be the seat of a story. It’s told and retold and passed along from generation to generation, carried to other villages, towns, all the way across the country, across the world even, kind of snowballing as it goes. But also, to mix my metaphors, being honed, the story becomes sharper and more memorable, like a snowball blade.
What really helps it along is when big things like, oh, I don’t know, famous artists or writers of literature or stage plays come along and reimagine that old tale. They breathe new life into it. Of course, this is where the honing comes in. Some things are changed to fit the times, add a little zest, clear up some fuzzy motivation or uninteresting characters, and perhaps add some backstory. And this once dusty lore gets all shiny and exciting again, only to be passed on once more for hundreds of years or until it goes through another refurbishing and reinvigoration. For me, that’s why studying myth and folklore is so much fun. It’s like digging up mysteries through time, but they’re also kind of puzzles that you get to piece together, but there’s always pieces missing. You also don’t get the story itself, but you get to learn a little bit about the people who told it and then retold it. It’s also why I preface everything with, there are many different versions, but here’s one.
Who Was Takiyasha Hime? Japan’s Waterfall Demon Princess
So let’s start with Takiyasha Hime, because hers is just such a tale. We’ll look at her and some variations of her legend, and I’ll try to fold in as many as I can without making it entirely confusing.
You’ll usually hear her called just that, Takiyasha Hime. Taki means waterfall, put a pin in that. Yasha is interesting and has different meanings. It comes from the Sanskrit word yaksa or yaksha. A yasha could be a category of nature spirits or minor deities appearing in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain mythology, and these can be good or bad. A second meaning is used in Japanese Buddhism. The term and idea was borrowed, and for a while it changed to refer to evil creatures or demons. Put a pin in that too. These wicked ones, though, eventually heard the word of the Buddha or something, something, and changed their ways. They became guardian deities. So yasha are also high-ranking entities who look quite fearsome with their grimaces and fangs, their many arms and swords, and all those muscles and raging fire surrounding them. But in this case, they’re more bodyguards. And lastly, hime means princess, or it can just mean girl or young lady.
She’s mostly referred to as Takiyasha Hime, but according to some, that wasn’t her real name at all. She was born Satsuki-hime, May Princess, and changed her name later when she did a thing that bifurcated her life. We’ll get to that in a minute.
Who is she? Do you remember Taira no Masakado from episode 175? He was kind of a rebel warlord. Wannabe emperor of the east, and first samurai, all rolled into one. Long story short, he led an uprising in the 10th century against the imperial government. It didn’t end well. He was killed, beheaded, and his severed head was taken.
Revenge, Sorcery, and the Ruins of Soma Palace
This is where Takiyasha Hime comes in. She was his daughter, and she was furious, not only that her father had been brutally slain, but that they cut off his head and carried it away and displayed it in Kyōto, the then capital. In the most thrilling version of the story, the head never really died. It just scowled and growled at people and eventually flew off to a fishing village in what is now Tōkyō. There’s actually another version of how the head got there, and that involved Taira no Masakado’s daughter, Takiyasha Hime, and we’ll get to that too.
So what’s a daughter to do? Her beloved father has just been murdered, as well as many of his samurai and followers that the imperial army slaughtered. Well, she fled. That’s what she did. Takiyasha Hime returned to the ruined Soma Palace that was once occupied by her father and his clan, and there she learned magic, or my favorite phrasing, she taught herself magic.
Of course, there are different versions of the legend. In one, she was so filled with resentment, she visited Kifune Shrine every night at the hour of the ox, 2 a.m. There she prayed to the deity Kifune Myojin for the power to avenge her father’s death. She did this for 21 days, when she finally heard the voice of a fierce spirit tell her that she had been granted supernatural powers. It was then she changed her name from Satsukihime to Takiyasha Hime. There are small waterfalls at the Kifune Shrine, so it wasn’t just random. In that case, her name would mean Waterfall Demon or Night Demon Princess, more eloquently, the Night Demon Princess of the Waterfall.
If that story sounds familiar, remember the tale of Hashihime, episode 111, who, betrayed by her husband, also goes to the Kifune Shrine to pray and beg to be made strong enough to get revenge for that. Oh boy, did that work out for her. She’s still feared to this day.
Unlike Hashihime, though, Takiyasha Hime returns to the province of Shimosa and gathers a bunch of her father’s still-living followers. She then begins to plot her own rebellion to avenge his death. Only, the Imperial forces were already planning to kill her and her little army. They cornered her in the Soma Castle, where Takiyasha Hime used her supernatural powers to summon a giant skeleton to fight off the attackers, or to ravage Kyōto, depending on the story.
Unfortunately, she was eventually killed and joined her father in heaven. Or, if you’d like, in another version, she managed to escape, get her father’s head taken from Kyōto and properly buried in what is now Tōkyō. And then, she became a nun and lived the rest of her life like that.
A stage rendition of her tale adds a thrilling twist. After attaining her powers, she goes back to the Soma Castle and puts together her army, but not just of people. She also summons a bunch of dark yōkai and bad beasties, that enormous skeleton in the mix. Here, instead of the generic Imperial forces attacking by themselves, they are headed by a samurai named Ōya no Tarō Mitsukuni, who also just happens to be a practitioner of Onmyōdō, a far-out magical system that I talk about in episode 143, Abe no Seimei.
Toad Magic and the Brother’s Quest for Vengeance
Now, let’s get to the frog versions and more about that Gashadokuro. Before I start, in Japanese, the word for both frog and toad is kaeru. So, I use them interchangeably here. I do know that a frog and a toad aren’t the same thing.
And while there are more specific words, amagaeru, hikigaeru, and ushigaeru, for example, for different types of amphibians, in general, if someone opened a drawer and there sat a toad or a frog or a tiny rain frog on their underwear, they’d most likely say, “kaeru ga iru,” “there’s a frog,” not distinguishing what kind.
Okay, there’s another version of Takiyasha Hime’s story that mentions her younger brother, Yoshikado. So, it starts the same. Their father raised a rebellion against the imperial court, but it was crushed and he was killed. His children fled as far as Lake Tazawa, which is in present-day Akita Prefecture, quite far from where the uprising took place. His daughter, Takiyasha, wished to devote her life to the memorial rites of her deceased father. So, she shaved her head, became a nun, and changed her name to Kisaragini, also with a different middle kanji, sometimes called Nyoro-zoni. Was she a nun, or did she secretly study magic to get revenge?
There’s a variation where she and her brother separated, and her brother somehow didn’t know about the killing. Maybe they fled when the fighting started, although Masakado seemed to be fighting all the time. Anyway, young Yoshikado was up in the mountains, hanging out, when the spirit of a toad came to him and told him what had happened. His father was dead. Yoshikado became obsessed with revenge and began learning sorcery from this mysterious frog. He later took a scroll of powerful toad magic and went searching for his sister so she could learn too.
And still another variation has Takiyasha being bewitched by a toad spirit, possessing her and transforming her into a demon. And this is where she got her power and changed her name to Takiyasha Hime. So, she invites this Mitsukuni and his army to the old manor, and then she dresses up like a courtesan to fool him. Mitsukuni was a little suspicious of the whole thing, so while they were drinking and chatting, he very brilliantly begins to tell her in detail about the horrible and brutal way her father was slaughtered. And she just can’t help herself. She breaks down in tears. Her cover blown, she runs off, but returns again as the powerful sorceress, along with an army of not just men, but her other evil creatures, even a giant skeleton that she conjured from the bones of the battlefield.
I found while reading around the actual spell she used to summon the skeleton using Onmyōdō-style incantations while reading from a scroll. So, let’s find out what happens if I read the spell. Stay back now, and you might want to keep an eye on the windows and doors. I take no responsibility for what might happen.
Okay, here I go. Kyū kyū nyo ritsu ryō. That’s it. It’s quite short. Everything okay over there? No clattering bones in the hallway or anything? So, the incantation basically means quickly, quickly, in accordance with the law. It’s a phrase that often appears in Daoist and Onmyōdō magic spells. A more generous interpretation would be, “Let this command be carried out immediately according to the laws of heaven.” And that doesn’t sound too bad at all. Not like a curse, more like an affirmation, really. Anyway, I hope you’re safe, but you can jot it down if you ever need a yōkai army or monster skeleton to do your bidding.
The Battle and Kuniyoshi’s Famous Skeleton Print
So, here is the climax. The image of Takiyasha Hime riding on the back of a giant toad to fight Mitsukuni and his imperial army alongside her brother. All the other warriors they could find, various wicked creatures she conjured, and a giant skeleton stomping alongside all of them. Sadly, they were greatly outnumbered and our waterfall demon princess was killed in battle. As she fell, they say, just before her last breath, a stream of demonic energy left her body and along with it, the spirit of the evil toad. Her face was calm and gentle again.
When anyone talks about Takiyasha Hime, the first thing they imagine, and I’m going out on a limb here saying this, is the Ukiyo-e print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi. Earlier tellings of her story didn’t really mention a giant skeleton. In Kuniyoshi’s frightful triptych, Takiyasha is holding a scroll and reading the incantation while the sorcerer Mitsukuni and his attendant, I guess it is, are being a little surprised by this huge skeleton tearing through the wall. The gorgeous piece of artwork titled Takiyasha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre kind of linked her with the skeleton monster, but Kuniyoshi never called it a gashadokuro. Everyone just kind of assumed that.
Gashadokuro: The Giant Skeleton of Japanese Folklore
So this brings us to our second star of today, the gashadokuro. Let’s start with the name, as we always do. It actually has two different ways of being written and two different meanings. The first all kanji combine gasha, starving person, with dokuro, skull, the skull of a starving person. But note that dokuro can also refer to skeletal remains, which makes more sense. Another reading would be gasha written in hiragana and being an onomatopoeia, gasha-gasha, the sound of bones rattling. It’s thought this way of writing it is actually older than the all kanji way.
These giant creatures are found on the battlefields, mass grave sites where people have died of famine or disease, or any place where you have a lot of dead and a lot of bones that have not been properly buried. The idea being their bones and restless angry spirits all come together to form this monster. Some say it’s just the skulls that gather.
The gashadokuro appear at dusk through sunrise, although the hour of the ox, 2 a.m., is their main genki time when they wander around, looking for someone to eat. If you’re alone walking home late one night, they’ll either be completely silent and scare the living hell out of you by sneaking up unnoticed, or they’ll make a creepy kachi-kachi sound. That’s their teeth clacking together.
Your fate if you get spotted is grim. They’re around 10 meters tall with burning yellow or green eyes, and they will grab you in their bony hands, crush you in their fist, bite off your head, turn you upside down, and squeeze out all your blood into their gaping maw. You really don’t have a fighting chance. The gashadokuro is invincible. You can’t kill it because it’s already dead, but you can wait it out. Once they use up all their anger, they’ll dissipate or just slink away. I guess this is further proof that the skeleton seen in the Kuniyoshi print isn’t a gashadokuro because it got its butt kicked evidently.
Okay, I’ll stop here for today. Everyone, please stay safe and well, and I’ll talk to you again in two weeks. Bye-bye.
