The she-demon Irabaki haunts the bridge between this world and the next , appearing as the beautiful princess she used to be. Under command of the emperor, the legendary samurai Watanabe no Tsuna comes out of retirement to battle the demon and clear the bridge. Finding the princess, he sees through the demon’s illusion. Tsuna grabs the demon with one hand as it transforms into its true shape, while swinging his sword with the other to cut off the demon’s arm before it can escape. Continue reading →
I had no idea this story was such a well known legend until I did a Google Image search of “Watanabe No Tsuna” and turned up a lot of results, many of them depictions of the battle with the Irabaki Demon. Here are a few:
Depicting the demon having recovered her arm - by Kiyotada
I ran into a couple of old friends at the Metropolitan Museum of Art yesterday in the exhibit Storytelling in Japanese Art. In an “emaki” (handscroll) illustrating the story of “The Drunken Demon” I found the hero samurai Raiko (who I know from a folktale I tell of his battle with the Goblin Spider) andAbe no Seimei (my favorite Onmyoji, or yin/yang magician)—both in the same story like a Spiderman/Dr. Strange crossover in an issue of Marvel Team-Up.
Marvel Team-Up — Twice as Many Pages! Twice as Many Thrills!
Emaki are like the original comic books or animated movies, telling a story through text and sequential illustrations. A scroll might be 30′ long, and to read it you would look at about two feet at a time, unrolling it with your left hand while simultaneously rolling it up again with your right. “The Drunken Demon” version in the exhibit was told over three scrolls from the Edo period by Kaiho Yuchiku (1654-1728). A boyish demon becomes terrible when drunk, stealing all the beautiful women. When he captures the daughter of an aristocrat, Abe no Seimei uses his powers to find where the girl is held, and the Emperor orders Raiko and his warrior companions to rescue the girl—which they do with the help of three gods disguised as men, a tree that grows across a chasm to become a bridge, some poisoned saki and a golden helmet. In the climactic illustrations, after a wild feast featuring human sashimi, the sleeping demon is depicted as filling an entire room (described in the text as 10′ tall, but illustrated as if 30′ tall) before Raiko cuts his head off, blood spraying out in a fine mist just like in the modern samurai movies like “The Warrior’s Way” (a fun one I watched last night). Continue reading →
The she-demon Irabaki haunts the bridge between this world and the next , appearing as the beautiful princess she used to be. Under command of the emperor, the legendary samurai Watanabe no Tsuna comes out of retirement to battle the demon and clear the bridge. Finding the princess, he sees through the demon’s illusion. Tsuna grabs the demon with one hand as it transforms into its true shape, while swinging his sword with the other to cut off the demon’s arm before it can escape. Continue reading 
