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Bestiary of Cryptids & Legendary CreaturesThe Nue is a monkey-headed, serpent-tailed creature whose cry troubles Japan’s imperial palace and whose ghost seeks a monk’s prayers.
Also recorded as 鵺, Monster Nue
Yorimasa takes two arrows to the palace. In The Tale of the Heike, one is meant for the apparition frightening the emperor. If that shot fails, he intends the other for the courtier who recommended him. The celebrated monster hunt begins with a warrior angry at the task he has been given. [9]
Read the manuscriptThe Nue joins an unsettling voice to a body assembled from several animals. The New National Theatre’s account explains the name through a resemblance in sound: nue first named a bird, now identified there as White’s thrush, and the unknown beast cried like it. The bird and the monster need not look alike for the name to pass between them. [8]
In A. L. Sadler’s translation of The Tale of the Heike, the creature’s body is examined only after it falls from the cloud. Those who approach with torches find a monkey’s head, a badger’s body, a snake’s tail and tiger-like feet. A recognizable voice belongs to an animal that no single familiar outline can contain. [9]
The Heike episode belongs to the imperial palace under Emperor Konoe. Night after night, around the hour of the Ox, a black cloud rises from the direction of the Higashi Sanjō wood and hovers over the building. The emperor is terrified. Celebrated priests chant powerful sutras without relief, and the courtiers meet to decide what should be done. [9]
Their precedent is another palace disturbance. Under Emperor Horikawa, the warrior Yoshiie had stood on the veranda, sounded his bowstring three times and proclaimed his name with such force that those listening bristled with fear. The emperor’s distress had ceased. Remembering that success, the council chooses Yorimasa from the warriors of the Taira and Minamoto families. He is being asked to defend the court against something its religious specialists have failed to drive away. [9]
Yorimasa objects that palace guards normally confront rebels and people who disobey imperial commands; apparitions are an unfamiliar assignment. Nevertheless, an imperial order must be obeyed. He takes his trusted retainer Hayata to the palace veranda, carrying a lacquered bow and two barbed arrows. The second arrow has a purpose beyond ordinary precaution. Masayori, the courtier who proposed him, will become its target if the first misses the monster. The threat gives the dutiful expedition a bitter private condition. [9]
At the accustomed hour, the cloud approaches. Yorimasa looks up and distinguishes a strange shape inside it. Determined not to survive failure, he invokes Hachiman, draws the bow and shoots. His arrow strikes. As he cries out in triumph, Hayata runs forward, seizes the falling creature and holds it down. He drives his sword through it nine times. Others arrive with torches to inspect the composite body. The court’s unseen visitor has become something that can be pinned to the ground. [9]
The grateful emperor awards Yorimasa the sword Shishiō, the Lion King. Minister Yorinaga brings it down the palace steps. A cuckoo calls overhead, prompting the minister to improvise a verse about a bird making its name in the sky. Yorimasa answers by looking toward the crescent moon and turning its curved shape into a bow that might shoot the bird. He receives the sword as a poet as well as an archer. The monster is put into a boat and sent adrift. [9]
Sadler’s chapter then tells a second encounter under Emperor Nijō. A Nue cries once over the palace and falls silent. Darkness hides it so completely that Yorimasa has no visible mark. He shoots a large whirring arrow toward the place where the cry was heard. Its noise startles the creature into flight. He follows at once with a smaller whirring arrow, strikes it and brings it down. People rush out of the palace in confusion. This time his reward is an imperial robe, presented with another exchange of verse. The first shot has made the second possible. [9]
These victories appear in Book IV, chapter XV, of Sadler’s 1918 Heike translation. Before reaching the hunt, the chapter recalls Yorimasa’s frustration with court service. He guards the palace but lacks the privilege of entry. A poem about standing outside, unable to see the moon through the trees, helps secure his advancement. Later, seeking a higher rank, he writes of gathering acorns beneath an oak, condemned to remain below its branches. The poet who answers Yorinaga so readily has already used verse to ask for recognition. His words can change his standing as surely as his bow can defend the court. [9]
The palace disturbance has an hour and a direction. This regularity gives Yorimasa a place to wait, even though it has given the priests no remedy. In the second encounter he has still less to work with: one cry in darkness. His noisy arrow makes the hidden creature answer with movement. [9]
Japanese descriptions use tanuki for the torso, while the Ashmolean glossary and Sadler’s English translation call it a badger. Performer Koji Teshima’s Japanese interview uses 狸, the raccoon dog. These are differences in the wording of a body description, not evidence of two additional creatures inside the Nue. [7][2][9]
An ink drawing in the Metropolitan Museum, attributed to Hokusai and dated to the eighteenth or nineteenth century, compresses the encounter into fur, claws and a long curling tail with a snake-like end. Warrior and weapon imagery surround the animal. The dense marks of its body contrast with the pale paper; the tail carries the eye away from the compact torso. The museum’s qualified attribution remains part of the work’s identity. [4]
Noh carries the story to Ashiya. In the 2018 edited translation, a monk travelling from Kumano toward Kyoto is refused lodging and stays in a riverside temple despite a warning. A rotten dugout approaches. Its indistinct boatman reveals himself as Nue’s ghost, asks for prayers, recalls the killing and disappears among the waves. [1]
A villager explains that the body was enclosed in the boat, cast into the Yodo River and carried to Ashiya. The monk recites a sutra; the ghost returns in its original form. It acknowledges its harmful opposition to Buddhist and imperial order, contrasting Yorimasa’s reward with its own confinement and decay. Its appeal reaches beyond human life: grasses, trees, land, and beings with or without a heart can attain Buddhahood. Asking the distant moon for light, it sinks with the moon’s reflection. Salvation remains uncertain. [1]
Jakub Karpoluk’s study of animals in Noh attends to the defeated creature’s loneliness and desire to live. Its emotions do not require a performer to imitate each animal part. Mask, costume and controlled movement make an extraordinary body intelligible while leaving room for sorrow. The theatrical creature can be frightening in appearance and still draw an audience toward the life it wanted to keep. [6]
Teshima identifies the final plea for light with a poem by Izumi Shikibu. In his reading, its urgent desire for rescue speaks for the Nue decaying inside its dugout. He also stresses that spectators may sympathize with either the victorious Yorimasa or the defeated creature. The performance holds those possibilities together without requiring the audience to forget what brought the warriors to the palace. [7]
Scholar Raluca Nicolae records an Ehime story in which Yorimasa’s mother goes to pray beside a pond after her son is summoned to the capital. She becomes a Nue with a monkey’s head and a dragon’s body; her breath makes fog over Fujimine village. The account gives the creature a family relationship and a local explanation for weather, instead of the palace enemy’s role. It reaches this manuscript through Nicolae’s study. [5]
The same study quotes an English retelling that equips the beast with wings and dragon scales, unlike the more familiar four-animal body. Nicolae treats Nue, Baku and Raijū as distinct hybrid beings. The New National Theatre also records a thunder-beast association in some legends. Neither resemblance nor a borrowed animal part makes every Nue a lightning creature, or turns the dream-eating Baku into another name for the palace intruder. [5][8]
Kunisada’s 1847–1848 print gives the action a particular illumination. In the Ashmolean description, Yorimasa holds a torch after wounding the Nue, allowing Hayata to finish it. Ayame no Mae watches from a veranda; the accompanying account identifies her as the court lady whose hand Yorimasa will receive. This picture makes room for an observer and a marriage reward beside the warriors and their quarry. [2]
A seal caddy, or inrō, made about 1850 divides the episode between two faces. The Montreal Museum’s object has five cases, with lacquer on wood and ivory inlay. Yorimasa occupies its back; Hayata kills the Nue on its front. Turning the small object changes the participant in view. The credited workshops are Kajikawa and Shibayama, and the action survives in a form designed to be handled as well as looked at. [3]
Teshima describes a different kind of turn onstage: one performer changes between Yorimasa, Hayata and Nue without changing costume. Gesture and voice carry the shifts in role. In its 2008–2009 season, the New National Theatre presented Sakate Yoji’s new Nue, inspired by the Noh play and concerned with the creature in different forms. The palace visitor remains available to contemporary theatre as a dramatic presence rather than a fixed diagram. [7][8]
Sadler’s chapter leaves the first creature afloat in a boat and moves on to another imperial summons. Its last lines then return to Yorimasa’s fatal revolt, in which his rank, estates and past service cannot preserve him. Read within that frame, the triumphant archer is already vulnerable. The monster’s death ends one crisis; the man who achieves it will not always stand on the winning side. [9]
Sadler supplies the complete Heike chapter. The edited Noh text, Teshima’s interview and Karpoluk’s study distinguish the ghost’s drama from the hunt. Nicolae traces variants; the Ashmolean, Montreal and Met records identify particular artworks. The New National Theatre documents a modern production. [9][1][7][6][5][2][3][4][8]
Zeami, as attributed in the program; modern rendering by the Noh.com editorial department · Caliber Cast / the Noh.com editorial department · 10 August 2018 · English translation and modern Japanese rendering
Story Paper 052, 1–12
A modern edited rendering of the play.
Checked 2026-10-11
Ashmolean Eastern Art curatorial collective · Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
EA1983.37.a; description and glossary
Checked 2026-10-10
Artwork
Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.
Manuscript checked 2026-10-13. Artistic interpretations © Scott Schubr / Luminary Oddities.
Return to the Bestiary ↑MMFA curatorial collective · Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
1944.Ee.10; about 1850
Checked 2026-10-10
Met Asian Art curatorial collective · Metropolitan Museum of Art
56.121.3; eighteenth–nineteenth-century ink study
Checked 2026-10-10
Raluca Nicolae · Cogito, Dimitrie Cantemir Christian University · 2012
Nue section, PDF 2–5
The regional accounts are cited through this study.
Checked 2026-10-10
Jakub Karpoluk · Analecta Nipponica / Japonica · 2018
Printed 53–54; Nue and Entertaining aspects of a performance
Checked 2026-10-10
Koji Teshima, interviewed by festival editors · Tokyo Metropolitan Arts Festival / Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture · 2025 · Japanese; English counterpart consulted
勝者頼政と敗者鵺 section; performance highlights
Checked 2026-10-10
NNTT dramaturgical/editorial collective · New National Theatre, Tokyo
2008/2009 season introduction
Production introduction, rather than the complete Sakate script.
Checked 2026-10-10
Anonymous; translated by A. L. Sadler · Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, vol. XLVI, part II; Internet Archive transcription · 1918 · English translation from Japanese
Book IV, chapter XV, Nue, pp. 205–209
Checked 2026-10-13