S P O T ／ SPOT-025

Nuezuka (The Nue's Burial Mound)

鵺塚ぬえづか

The nue — a chimeric creature with the head of a monkey, the body of a tanuki, the tail of a snake, and the legs of a tiger — is Japan's most conceptually interesting monster. Its name has entered modern Japanese as a metaphor for anything that resists categorization: political positions, unnameable anxieties, identities that refuse easy description. According to the Heike Monogatari, the warrior Minamoto no Yorimitsu shot this creature from the night sky over the Imperial Palace in the 12th century, and its body, loaded onto a boat, drifted down what is now the Dōjima River until it grounded somewhere in present-day Ōsaka. Multiple mounds across the city claim to be the burial site of the creature's remains. The exact locations are now uncertain — urban development has moved, paved over, or simply lost most of them — but the tradition of marking the nue's presence persists in neighborhood customs and street-name etymologies. What this means in practice is that the monster's bones are somewhere beneath Ōsaka's neon-lit entertainment district, in a subterranean presence that the city has chosen, characteristically, to remember by continuing to argue about where exactly they ended up.