Rashomon no Oni

The Rashomon no Oni legend is a medieval cycle of monster subjugation, in which an oni dwelling at the Rashomon (properly Rajomon) at the southern edge of Heian-kyo is fought by Watanabe no Tsuna, one of the four heavenly kings of Minamoto no Yorimitsu. Among the four, who vie for martial honour, Tsuna alone offers to test the rumour that an oni appears at the Rashomon. On a rainy night, as he crouches before the gate, a great arm reaches out from behind and grasps the bowl of his helmet. Tsuna sweeps with his celebrated sword Higekiri and cuts off the arm. Later, the oni, disguised as Tsuna's foster mother, comes to his residence, takes back the sealed arm and rises into the sky, fleeing toward the Northern Hills. The structure has three parts: the challenge and wager at the Rashomon; the night encounter and the cutting-off of the arm; and the recovery by disguised foster-mother and retreat. The cycle is a sister-tradition to the arm-tale of Ibaraki-doji on Ichijo-modoribashi, and the otogi-zoshi Rashomon stages the same oni appearing twice. The Rashomon is the south gate of the capital that opens toward the outside, and its boundary character serves as the narrative apparatus for the appearance of the oni. The four motifs - martial test, wager, named sword and disguised relative - are basic elements that recur across the Yorimitsu four-heavenly-kings cycles. The site is the former Rashomon at Kujo-machi, Minami-ku, Kyoto (only a stone marker stands in a children's park today). The Rajomon was blown down in 818, rebuilt and again destroyed in 980; thereafter it was not rebuilt and became a symbolic site of Heian-kyo's decline. The Northern Hills (Kitayama) area is given as where the oni's arm fled. Tsuna's sword Higekiri is identified with the Onikiri-maru held by Kitano Tenmangu in Kamigyo, Kyoto, and is designated an Important Cultural Property. Sources include the Muromachi otogi-zoshi Rashomon (published in the Otogi Bunko collection in Kanbun 6 [1666]), the noh play Rashomon (by Kanze Kojiro Nobumitsu, late Muromachi) and the Heike Monogatari sword scroll. Akutagawa Ryunosuke's 'Rashomon' (1915) is based on volume 29 of the Konjaku Monogatarishu, 'How a thief climbed to the upper storey of the Rajomon and saw a corpse', a separate tradition, but stands alongside the oni-taiji cycle as the representative Rashomon literature. The shrine's sword records and the Kyoto Board of Education's regional materials provide further documentation.