Chapter 1 — The Heir Returns (Part 1)

The only thing a tanuki ought to do is have fun.

Why don’t we take things from there?

I myself am a tanuki living in the modern city of Kyoto, but not content with that lowly station, I find admiring the tengu from afar and imitating the ways of humans to be great fun. This exasperating idiosyncrasy, quite assuredly passed down generation by generation from our distant forebears, is what my departed father used to call “fool’s blood”.

My father, Shimogamo Sōichirō, was the Trick Magister, the head of tanuki society in Kyoto. He was widely famed in and outside the city, even earning the grudging respect of the tengu. If he had been a tad more prudent, perhaps he would not have picked a quarrel with the Kurama tengu, or have been made into stew by the humans. But it was precisely because he was an extraordinary fool who was always dancing on the edge of a pot that he had left so many legends behind.

“Just my fool’s blood talking,” he used to say.

I came into the world in the Tadasu Forest as the third son of Shimogamo Sōichirō. Even as a child I showed flashes of greatness, and even before my footpads had fully developed I was already developing a reputation as the most irrepressible problem child the tanuki world had ever seen. Attempting to smoke out the Navel Stone in Rokkakudō with burning pine needles was only the tip of the iceberg; transforming into everything from bottle openers to mounted police officers, I confounded tengu and humans alike, earning a fair amount of disapproval for my recklessness. But how else could I live? The blood that ran through my veins, I had inherited from my father.

In short, fun things are good things.

One day in May, with the riotous blossoms of spring blooming all over the city and lush greenery covering the peaks of the Higashiyama Sanjūroppo mountains, a certain tanuki was living his usual best life, and it is here that our story begins.

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I have loved the month of May since I was a pup, for it is a season which always gets my fool’s blood pumping.

Doesn’t the flourishing, brilliant green of the forest just remind you of a tanuki?

I hummed as I left the Tadasu Forest that day, enjoying the amiable spring breeze as I walked along the banks of the Kamo River. I was in the form of a blue-eyed, blonde-haired bombshell. Empty-headed students stopped and gawked as I strutted by the river, revelling in my skin-deep beauty.

My parade ended at the Masugata Court Apartments in the rear of the Demachi shopping arcade. Though the crisp breeze outside reached into the recesses of the many alleys of Kyoto, the apartment itself was as dismal as a musty old futon.

This apartment was where Master Akadama, that half-retired old tengu, spent his days flaring his temper only to deflate just as quickly. Still possessed of the august title of Yakushibō of Nyoigadake, he had once been a grand tengu who had lorded over all of the mountain of Nyoigadake. But after being soundly defeated in a turf war by the Kurama tengu, he now secluded himself here behind the shopping arcade, and you’d hardly think it to look at him now that he’d ever been a tengu in the first place.

“Yoo-hoo Master, guess who!” I called into the inner room, to hear the grouchy-sounding Master reply, “Yasaburō?”

“My, but we are in a crabby mood today, aren’t we?”

“In all my time here on this earth I’ve yet to find anything worth being cheerful about.”

“Now, now, not this again…but maybe a visit from a winsome wench might cheer you up! Feast your eyes upon these luscious locks of flaxen hair…”

“Enough with your cheap imitations, it sickens me!”

I set down my groceries in the kitchen and entered the inner room to see the Master sitting cross-legged in his wine-stained futon, glowering at a stone which was sitting on a gold brocaded cushion in front of him. It was an ordinary grey stone about the size of a fist, with no distinguishing features to speak of.

“A keystone for tengu stew!” I exclaimed.

“Even a fool such as you couldn’t mess up a stew with one of these.”

“Now, was that comment really necessary?”

Tengu stew is a hot pot made by throwing tofu and spring onions and cabbage and chicken into a pot filled with water, then putting in that stone and bringing it all to a simmer. It’s quite delicious with ponzu sauce. Yet leave out that single stone and the flavor just isn’t the same. This particular stone was a hardy veteran that had spent years making the rounds at restaurants all over Kyoto, and the instant you threw it in the pot, it exuded the accumulated savoriness of uncountable stews. There was another keystone in a restaurant by Kōdaiji that even now was continuing to ripen.

According to Master Akadama, tengu stew was intended to be prepared deep in the mountains, and therefore unless you could taste the bracing mountain air in each mouthful it could not be called true tengu stew. Here in the apartment the air was choked with dust and tanuki hair, so stew that was prepared here was only at best an imitation. Of course once I placed the stew in front of him the Master would slurp it up with gusto; such fickle beings are the tengu.

“By your leave,” I said, scooping up the stone and holding it up with reverence before heading into the kitchen and beginning to prepare the stew.

“Yasaburō, are you still hunting those damned tsuchinoko?”

“Why don’t you come along? I’m heading up to Nyoigadake tomorrow.”

“Preposterous,” the Master snorted. “You only ever did take after Sōichirō’s foolishness.”

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By the time we were finishing up the dregs of the stew, the sun was going down.

I patted my full belly, while Master Akadama puffed on a tengu cigar with satisfaction. A trail of purple smoke drifted up from the cigar, coiling around the lampshade like a tiny dragon.

“The days sure have gotten long.”

“Another pointless day comes to an end.”

“Has Benten written you lately?”

The Master’s eyes flickered to me in annoyance. “To what end do you ask?”

“Why won’t you just tell me?”

“Silence. Our correspondence is not of your concern.”

Benten was Master Akadama’s dearest, most prized disciple, and he had taught her everything he knew. With this newfound tengu strength she overpowered real tengu; with her stunning looks she transfixed humans; and with her propensity for dining on tanuki stew she had earned the lasting enmity of every tanuki in Kyoto. Master Akadama had swooped down and spirited her away as she trudged along the shore of Lake Biwa one day; who would have foreseen that she would so rapidly rise to such heights?

Benten had beguiled me into luring Master Akadama into a trap, thereby causing his downfall. Not only that, but she had also made my father into stew and eaten him, at every turn looking to do the same to me. How lamentable, then, that she also happened to be my first love.

“What’s wrong with being a tanuki?” I had once asked her.

“Well, I am a human,” she had replied.

Whenever I thought about this exchange I couldn’t help but squirm.

It was in spring, amidst the magnificent cherry blossoms of April, that she announced she was crossing the sea.

We had been taking an early morning walk along the Kamo River. She was flitting from treetop to treetop, savagely amusing herself by shaking the boughs until not a single petal remained.

I dashed through the storm of blossoms trying to keep up, panting, “What’s that about then?”

From her perch on a newly barren tree she surveyed the fluttering petals with delight. “I’ve grown bored,” she said simply. “Take care of the Master for me, won’t you, Yasaburō? I’ll write, if the mood takes me.”

After stripping a great many cherry trees in Kyoto she went to the port of Kobe, where she bewitched some magnate into giving her a luxurious ocean liner, on which she embarked on a cruise around the world. It was only after she had set sail that Master Akadama was informed of her departure, at which point it was too late to go after her.

She had yet to return from her grand, all-expenses-paid voyage.

Only the odd letter from Benten soothed the Master’s anguish. That she deigned to write at all was a blessing, but her cold-blooded loathing of having to send these missives was quite apparent. At best she might dash off a few lines, at worst she would only mark the paper with an X or O. Even so, Master Akadama anxiously awaited each letter, poring over each word as if inhaling it, before locking it away in his chest as if it were a national treasure. The reason I so fastidiously called upon the Master’s apartment was in part to sneak a look at these letters after the Master was too soused to notice.

Master Akasama peered into the empty pot and groaned, “Benten, curse her, seems to have gone to England. A more unreachable place I can hardly imagine.”

Rummaging through a pile of junk he produced a globe, rotating it round and round until he found England.

“A trifling little island,” he scoffed. “Alas, that one who should one day follow in my great footsteps fritters her days away on this damned pleasure cruise. If she would only settle down, devote herself to the path of wickedness…”

“I wonder what she’s up to.”

“Hmph. Devouring some English tanuki, no doubt.”

I heard her whisper in my head then, unbidden, that beautiful enemy of mine: I like you so much I could just eat you up. She had betrayed her master, eaten my father, and at every turn was trying to eat me too; yet still I longed for her return. This, even I had to admit, was the trouble with having fool’s blood.

“You seem lonely, Yasaburō.” The Master fixed his gaze on me. “Because Benten is not here. Is that not so?”

“Hah, whatever do you mean?”

“Know your place, wretch. Think you that she would show mercy to a mere tanuki?” He plucked at his nose hairs. “But if you wish to hurl yourself into a pot I shan’t stop you.”

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That spring I devoted myself to hunting for tsuchinoko.

Humans have a saying: “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” It means that a fool with too much time on his hands will always get up to no good. We tanuki have a similar saying, except, well, with paws instead of hands. If you’ve got time to get into mischief, then you’ve got time to run around hunting for tsuchinoko, and the latter would be better for all involved. Wise words, if you ask me. I’d gotten started with tsuchinoko hunting because of my late father; when he was young he was always scurrying around helter-skelter looking for tsuchinoko, and that must have been his way of working off his roiling fool’s blood.

A tsuchinoko is a funny-looking sort of snake, short and stout, that has a long and honorable history as a cryptid, being recorded as far back as the early 18th century in the Illustrated Sino-Japanese Encyclopedia _under the name _nozuchihebi. Every so often a tsuchinoko-hunting craze will sweep over the tanuki world, in a phenomenon that started long before I was born. I’ve heard it said that my father spent about 80% of his turbulent childhood on some adventure or other looking for tsuchinoko. This spirit of adventure is no doubt due to the fool’s blood that runs through our veins, affecting some in our line to the point that the hunt for this mythical creature drove them to ruin.

My mother never understood what was so exciting about tsuchinoko. “These tsuchinoko, they’re like bamboo shoots, right?”

“No, bamboo shoots are takenoko! And they’re not even close!”

“But you can eat them, can’t you?”

I showed her a picture.

“What a funny little snake. I’ll bet the meat is chewy as can be.” She seemed to be fixated on the idea of cooking them. “No, no, they don’t seem tasty one bit!”

“I told you already, you don’t eat them!”

“Don’t eat them? Then what do you do with them?”

“I’m starting to feel like this isn’t for you, mother.”

“Now that I think about it, Sō used to hunt for these things when he was young. Goodness, I just don’t get it! Little tanuki boys are always interested in the strangest things!”

And forthwith she transformed into a beautiful young man and went on her way to the Takarazuka Revue.

I headed to the well on the grounds of Rokudō Chinnōji and asked my brother Yajirō whether he wanted to join me in the hunt for the tsuchinoko.

He demurred, though, claiming, “Even if we found one, it’d probably gulp me down in one go. It’s a snake, see, and I’m a frog.”

There was no arguing with that.

At the time, Yaichirō, our eldest brother, was always coming and going from Nanzenji, his hands full working behind the scenes to resurrect the Nanzenji Tanuki Shogi Tournament, which had been co-founded by Father along with the previous head of the Nanzenji clan. Father had always been fond of shogi, but then again he had also been fond of tsuchinoko-hunting. In spite of that, Yaichirō obstinately insisted that shogi had more cultural merit than tsuchinoko-hunting did.

“Stop chasing after phantoms!” he was always admonishing me, which meant that inviting him was a non-starter.

In the end I had to drag Yashirō, my unwilling little brother, into joining the Tsuchinoko Expeditionary Brigade. Here was the chain of command: Father, the founder; myself, Father’s successor and current brigade leader; and Yashirō, the first and so far only enlisted member. I was always on the hunt for new recruits.

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The day after I called upon Master Akadama I led the Tsuchinoko Expeditionary Brigade into the forests of Shishigatani and wandered the foot of Nyoigadake. The boughs of the trees were lush with new foliage, full and thick as a tanuki’s bushy tail, and the wind whispered through the thousand rays of light streaming through the leaves.

“Smells like spring, doesn’t it Yasaburō?”

“Come on, focus. They could be hiding anywhere.”

“But do you think they’re really out there?”

“Not, this wouldn’t be nearly as fun if we knew for sure, would it?”

Seeing as tsuchinoko have never been confirmed to exist, in my mind it stood to reason that capturing them would require an equally unfathomable strategy. All the ordinary tactics had already been tried; it was the things that made you ask yourself, “What’s the point?” that had a real shot at working. We hid hard-boiled eggs sprinkled with MSG and gourds filled with cheap sake in tree branches, and recorded any mysterious tracks we found in our field notes.

I had intended to use this opportunity to instill the joy of tsuchinoko-hunting in my little brother and set him on the path to becoming a useful brigade member. But rather than showing any interest in the mysteries of the tsuchinoko right in front of him, he preferred to talk about the intricacies of magnetism. In the end he opened up the clasp of his backpack and pulled out a textbook, reading as he walked along like a studious little schoolboy. If he would apply just 1% of that studiousness to tsuchinoko-hunting…but when I brought this up to him, he just said innocently as if he didn’t understand, “They say that genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration!”

The cheek of him.

“Not quite, Yashirō. It’s 99% foolishness, 1% inspiration.”

“Then where does the perspiration come in?”

“You just have to wait for providence.”

“I don’t think it works like that, Yasaburō.”

“Cheeky little squirt!” But hardly had these words left my mouth when the trees suddenly began to rustle as if an invisible giant was stirring. In the sky, a queer whistling started getting louder and louder.

“Get down!” I forced Yashirō down and used my body to cover him, just as something came hurtling through the canopy past my head. The sunlight rippled and a shower of leaves rained down around us. I felt a loud thump reverberate in my bones, before silence returned.

Trembling, we looked up.

Above us, nestled in a tree branch and covered in leaves, was a velvet sofa. Its crimson fabric glittered magnificently in the sunlight.

Yashirō looked at me and wondered, “Yasaburō, is this what they called tengu hail?”

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Tengu hail is what tanuki call the phenomenon of expensive objects raining down from the sky. It’s generally the result of tengu playing tricks, or merely being careless with their belongings, and in the old days they used to drop everything from cash and coins to sake barrels and koi. Mother claimed that when she was young cotton candy had fallen out of the sky at the end of the bridge on Sanjō Avenue over the Takase River. One enterprising tanuki had even opened up a well-known museum by Mount Funeoka showcasing a collection of tengu hail. Back when Master Akadama had soared the skies in his prime, he had often driven his pupils out into the streets to search for things he had dropped.

For the past few days the talk of the town had revolved around the chic tengu hail that had been falling: gleaming sets of silverware; a venerable, distinguished-looking violin; a gold-footed bathtub; a Persian carpet that looked like it might fly off into the sky on its own. All in all, a most lavish assortment of items. According to custom dating back to the Edo period, as long as no tengu claimed it, tengu hail belonged to whoever happened to find it. Little wonder that the tanuki of Kyoto were in an uproar.

By custom, then, this velvet chesterfield was now property of the Shimogamo clan.

My brother and I managed to wrestle it down from the tree branch. The crimson fabric felt wonderfully luxurious beneath my bottom. It felt like being a guest of honor in some manor house. Even the slightly musty smell only made it seem more grand. The two of us lay back like pampered princes and sighed with satisfaction.

“It’s so soft I can’t even feel my butt!” said Yashirō in euphoria.

“Now this is the real deal. It’s what you’d call an antique.”

“Mother will be so happy when we bring this home!”

“Very good. Henceforth the Tsuchinoko Expeditionary Brigade shall become the Chesterfield Moving Company. Private, move to the end of the sofa and pick it up.”

“Sir yes sir!”

Hoisting the sofa up between us, we huffed and puffed our way down the mountain. It was a distinguished looking sofa with a heft to match, and we soft, coddled pups of the modern age found it hard going.

“My arms are sore!” Yashirō whined.

“This mountain ain’t called Mount Sorearms for nothing, you know.”

“No it’s not, it’s called Nyoigadake!” he giggled.

A short while later he whispered nervously, “Yasaburō, are we gonna get in trouble for going tsuchinoko hunting all the way out here?”

“Who’s going to get mad at us?”

“Doesn’t this place belong to the Kurama tengu?”

“Kurama, Schmurama. How would we ever find a tsuchinoko if we were scared of the likes of those guys? And anyhow, Nyoigadake belongs to our very own Master Akadama. He may have lost his territory in a turf war, but he’s still way stronger than the Kurama. Compared to the Master, those guys are just a bunch of pipsqueaks!”

“Pipsqueaks, eh?”

All of a sudden the sofa got a whole lot heavier. I pulled and pulled, but it wouldn’t budge an inch. “Yashirō, you holding up your end over there?”

I turned my head around to look, when right next to my ear a voice breathed, “Hootie-hoo!” I froze, feeling a cold breath prickle my neck, just as someone grabbed me by the scruff of my neck.

“Real wise guy, aren’t ya? Where you boys from?” Perched on the sofa was a man in a black suit.

I shrank back. “Uh, how do you do, Mr. Kurama Tengu sir! Lovely day, isn’t it?”

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Yashirō and I were marched up to the fire pits of Daimonji. Yashirō’s courage had shriveled up and he reverted to his tanuki form, whereupon the tengu picked him by the nape of his neck like he was a cat.

Back when Master Akadama had lorded over the entirety of Nyoigadake, all the tanuki pups of the Akadama School had been dragged out to his mountain under the guise of holding practicums. Sometimes we were taken to Iwayasan or Takaragaike, but most of the time we roamed around the Master’s own Nyoigadake. I still remembered fondly how we’d practice our transformations at the Daimonji fire pit and reenact battles from the Genpei War.

“This way, move!” the Kurama tengu snarled, leading the way up the slope along the giant “dai” character.

Trampling over the springy grass, I looked back and saw lying there, beneath the cloudy sky, the great shining city of Kyoto. This was how the tengu saw the world.

About halfway up the slope was a red and white striped parasol that reminded me of an ice cream stand, and seated at a round table beneath it were four Kurama tengu, playing at hanafuda. Some wore their suits and ties neatly, while others sat there with their arms folded, veins bulging in their forehead. Each time they tossed down a card there was a metallic clatter, as if they were tossing coins on the table. Tengu are notoriously short-tempered, and once they get into a game they tend to tear or bite at the cards, which explains why tengu hanafuda cards are always made from steel.

The tengu leading us up shouted, “Hootie-hoo, Reizanbō!”

One of the tengu turned around. He’d taken his suit jacket off and was wearing sunglasses.

“Hootie-hoo, Tamonbō. Who’re the knuckleheads?”

“These wise guys was slanderin’ us, see, and I couldn’t just let that slide.”

“Oh, we know how to put tanuki in their place. What were they sayin’?”

“Said we was a bunch of pipsqueaks!”

The tengu at the table burst into laughter, the sound of their cackling drifting over to us on the wind like a dark, ill-omened cloud. Reizanbō, Tamonbō, Teikinbō, Getsurinbō, Nichirinbō: these five were part of the Kurama Ten, followers of Sōjōbō of Kuramayama, and the very same tengu who had usurped Master Akadama’s domain of Nyoigadake. They all looked alike as acorns, though, and it was impossible to tell one from the other. Master Akadama had once sneered during a meeting at Mount Atago, “Nothing but a bunch of mountain acorns stuffed into three-piece suits!” A very sensible observation, in my opinion.

I got down on my hands and knees in the ashen dirt and said, “My name is Yasaburō, third son of Shimogamo Sōichirō! Accompanying me is my brother, Yashirō.”

“Ooh, a bona fide celebrity!” The tengu hooted and clacked their cards together, babbling over each other.

“So this is the Shimogamo Yasaburō!”

“Hear Benten’s got a shine for him!”

“Sōichirō, that’s that poor sap they made into soup, ain’t that right?”

“I remember him!”

“He always was too big for his britches. Musta been cuz that Yakushibō was always egging him on.”

“That old clown’s always been like that. Thinks he’s hot stuff just because some tanuki are suckin’ up to him!”

Reizanbō (the one in sunglasses) chomped down on his cigar and sneered, “One lucky SOB, that Yakushibō. Don’t matter how far he falls, he can always count on some tanuki to prop him up. Well, Nyoigadake’s ours, so you can scurry on back and tell him to choke on that!”

“If I may.” I raised myself from the ground and let the sophistry begin to flow. “It is true, I did call the illustrious Kurama tengu a ‘bunch of pipsqueaks’. But it seems to me that perhaps, the Kurama tengu, the cream of the crop, the lords of the sky, living up in your ivory towers, may not be fully acquainted with the uncouth language such as we lowly tanuki are accustomed to using. You see, we change the meanings of our words along with the times, and so the word pipsqueak, which formerly meant ‘small, juvenile, unworthy’, now has come to mean ‘grand, manful, improbably genteel’. It is a most decorous and complimentary word. Far be it from me to ridicule the great Kurama tengu!”

The Kurama were struck dumb with amazement, the only sound the clinking of the hanafuda cards. Reizanbō pushed down his sunglasses to leer at me and grinned unpleasantly. “You think you’re real smart, don’t you?”

“I don’t like tanuki with big mouths,” Tamonbō commented, grabbing Yashirō by the scruff and lifting him high into the air. “Say, how far do you fellas think I could make this little furball fly?”

The tengu all grinned and clacked their cards.

“I’ll give you odds that he makes it over the Kamo River!”

“Sure, cards was boring me anyways!”

“You want we should bet on peaks or valleys?”

My father, the Trick Magister Shimogamo Sōichirō, had once transformed into the entirety of Nyoigadake and scared the Kurama tengu out of their wits, in retaliation for their tormenting his old teacher, Master Akadama. It was known as the False Nyoigatake Caper. It was a mad thing to do, and as such had earned a glorious place in the history not just of the Shimogamo clan, but of all tanukidom. To my clan, this was a victory of historical proportions, but to the Kurama tengu, it had been a black day in their history, and this grudge of theirs against my father would eventually lead to him being turned into the Friday Fellows’ stew.

The lesson that wise tanuki will come away with is this: to defy tengu is to invite misery. Tengu are those which torment tanuki. That is what makes them tengu.

“Well, Yasaburō?” said Reizanbō. “Anything you wanna say?”

“I’m afraid that whenever my little brother is being bullied my old tendency starts to act up…”

“Tendency? What tendency?”

“Ooh, I can’t stop it! I beg you sir, beware!” I moaned, falling to all fours and inflating my frame. Clenching your buttocks and concentrating is key when transforming into anything big. In the twinkling of an eye my legs grew as stout as the pillars of the Parthenon, the rising slope of my back turned as white as plaster, and my nose extended long and high into the air. I had transformed into a giant white elephant.

The Kurama tengu still remembered very well being chased around by a white elephant back when my father had transformed into Nyoigadake. Taking advantage of the brief moment where they were all transfixed by the memory of that humiliation, Yashirō wriggled out of Tamonbō’s grip, rolling down the slope like a tsuchinoko and making his escape.

“All right, tough guy, that’s enough of that,” Reizanbō grimaced. “We don’t hold with elephants around here, see? You just get back to your normal size, or else we’ll—”

It was precisely at that moment that a valise came whistling out of the sky at tremendous speed and slammed smack-dab into Reizanbō’s face. This was nothing more or less than punishment from heaven. Reizanbō dropped without a word, and the other tengu toppled like ninepins as if he had bowled them down, taking the parasol along with them. Jangling hanafuda cards flew left and right.

“What’s (baroom) going (pawoo) on?” I trumpeted, looking up to the sky.

Gliding down on the west wind was a lone English gentleman.