touhou drawn by jingo_kajiki

Redundant Addition

a.k.a. Afterword

Hello there! The wolfbear known as Jingo Kajiki here, barely scraping by the deadline. That being said... I guess it's a natural consequence of neglecting the manuscript to go to Suwa during the typhoon, go to Yakushima, etc. But in any case, this is my second YuuParu book. Thank you very much for picking it up. I've been hatching this story for about two years now, but my interpretations have changed a bit over that time. That reminds me, I used to live pretty close to Mt Ooe. I feel like the fact that I only realized after already moving away is kind of a disgrace. Seriously, they have huge oni dolls, shugenja temples and bronze statues and everything! How do you miss that!!!

But well, that brings us here! I want to properly go to the oni museum sometime. Honestly, I was planning to go before drawing this story, but, well... Also, a ferret tipped over the brush cleaning container, got ink all over its paws and then ran around with it, greatly disturbing the drawing process once more. Why must this happen to me... But now, let's get into the analysis. The scenes in the story keep hopping around kinda rapidly, so call this an addendum to help understand that.

Yuugi-san in this story is the child of a foreigner and a Japanese person, the idea being that a child born from a foreign father would've been considered strange-looking and abandoned. Apparently the other child in a pair of twins also used to be seen as an ill omen and thrown away. There's an interpretation that the "Shuten" in Shuten-douji might actually come from "sutego", abandoned child.

What made Yuugi-san become an oni was other people's anxiety, fear and deep hatred being embodied in the ostracized young child. Apparently in the times when children were thought to belong to the gods and have strange powers, beings with strange powers were sometimes dubbed "douji", which means child. Yuugi-san became an oni because she lost that divine protection and the hatred consumed her body. I figure, though, that only her body was consumed, and inside she was still that meek and innocent child.

The urge to feed is mentioned as far back as the Kojiki, and since food what is what builds your body, there's a general belief that eating the food of a given world will make you a resident of that world. By the way, I think that the beings known as oni include both those whose bodies transformed like big sister Yuugi, and those who were consumed by an oni that appeared and grew within them like Parsee. I figure that these "substantial" and "emotional" oni are a bit different from each other, but I'm running out of space, so I'll just get back to that when I get to Parsee's hashihime story one day. Jingo Kajiki

Reference:

Spacetime of the Unyielding – Reading the Shuten-douji Scrolls (Miyai Publications) Fairytales (Pt. 2) (Iwanami Collection) etc.