Nue (鵺)

The face of an ape, the limbs of a tiger, the tail of a serpent — open any text and its outline shifts ever so slightly. Some sources record the body as that of a tanuki, others as a tiger; still others hold that the head was a cat's and the torso a chicken's. Its form, as though stitched together from several beasts, seems almost to refuse the very notion of a fixed shape.

The nue appears in the world only on nights thick with the scent of upheaval. In the imperial court of the late Heian period, through the turmoil of the Northern and Southern Courts, each time the authority of the shogunate began to waver — it slips into the pages of the records. Chronicles, the diaries of courtiers, military tales — all of them do nothing more than quietly note, "that night, the nue cried," and leave its true nature untouched.

Its voice is said to resemble the mournful call of the white's thrush — a drawn-out, keening cry. Yet the accounts of those who heard it never quite agree: one person called it like a flute, another said it sounded like sobbing. Drifting down from the palace rooftops, that sound fractured the silence of the deep night, and without fail, someone would take to their bed by morning.

The tale of Minamoto no Yorimasa shooting the creature down at the Emperor's command is enshrined in The Tale of the Heike as a hero's deed — yet the nue that was supposedly slain continues to surface in the records thereafter. The Shishinden in 1333. The Kyoto Imperial Palace in 1774. That the same cry echoes across the centuries may mean the thing brought down was never the true body — or perhaps the nue is not any single creature at all, but something crystallized from the world's own distortions.

Even now its name is used as a figure of speech for anything whose nature cannot be grasped. Its form never settles, its voice arrives before it does, and it appears as a mirror to the anxieties of each age — the nue remains, to this day, a thing that will not be contained within the frame of any bestiary.