Shuten-doji

Shuten-doji is the most celebrated demon king of Japanese legend, lord of a band of oni dwelling in a rock palace on Mount Oe in Tanba province. A prodigious drinker who kept the guise of a great unshorn boy, whence his name 'sake-drinking lad,' he feasted on human flesh and blood, with fierce lieutenants such as Ibaraki-doji at his side. In the picture scrolls he gives his own origins, in one telling Echigo, in another Mount Ibuki in Omi.

In the reign of Emperor Ichijo, noblewomen kept vanishing from the capital, and the diviner Abe no Seimei traced the abductions to the demon of Mount Oe. The court dispatched Minamoto no Raiko (Yorimitsu) and Fujiwara no Yasumasa, attended by Raiko's four champions: Watanabe no Tsuna, Sakata no Kintoki, Usui Sadamitsu, and Urabe no Suetake. Disguised as yamabushi, they met three old men on the mountain path, avatars of the gods Hachiman, Sumiyoshi, and Kumano, who gave them a 'divine poison sake' that saps demons and strengthens men. Shuten-doji feasted the strangers, drank deep, and collapsed; the warriors donned their armor and Raiko struck off his head, which leapt into the air and clamped its teeth on the stacked helmets Raiko wore. The dying demon's cry, 'Oni do not deceive, it is you who lied,' became proverbial.

The earliest full version is the fourteenth-century scroll Oeyama Ekotoba in the Itsuo Art Museum; the tale was retold endlessly in otogizoshi, the noh play Oeyama, and Edo prints. A small shrine at Oi-no-saka west of Kyoto claims the burial mound of the head.