Just One Kiss

Stuck in Blue

Raiko and the Ground Spider

(See if this story matches with Go World cover depicting the apparation of the ground spider. If so. List the issue Season and No., and Link Kiseido)

Raiko, more formally known as Minamoto no Yorimitsu (948-1021), was a warrior of noble birth around whom gathered many legends celebrating his exploits in ridding the country of a variety of robbers, demons and ogres. One of these demons was known as Tsuchigumo, or The Ground Spider.

Folklorists think the name may denote a real person, possibly a brigand or highwayman who made his headquarters in a cave. In the stories, however, Tsuchigumo is a monstrous arachnid, notorious for luring travelers into the subterranean cavern where he dwells and dining on their blood.

Two of these legends contributed ideas to the theater, and from the theater to woodblock prints connected with go. In one of these legends Raiko and his lieutenant Watanabe no Tsuna are out on the moors investigating the strange apparition of a huge skull in the sky. They come to the hut of Yamamba, a man-eating hag. With her lives a boy known as Kaidomaru, brought up among animals and endowed with superhuman strength (his childhood is the subject of an independent cycle of legends). At the boy's own request Raiko receives him as a retainer and bestows on him the name of Kintoki.

Continuing their search, the small band enters a cavern beneath the hut. They make their way past a threatening host of goblins and at length encounter a mysterious woman of baleful beauty. As Raiko studies her he feels himself becoming enmeshed in a net of cobwebs and realizes that he is being bewitched. He cuts through the net with his sword, wounding the woman. She vanishes, for she was nothing more than an emanation sent out by the spider demon himself. They follow a trail of ichor deeper into the cavern, and at the end they find the horrible Ground Spider, which Raiko kills after a violent battle.

In the other legend, Raiko is suffering from a mysterious debilitating ailment and is sleeping in his own mansion. He is guarded by Watanabe no Tsuna, two other retainers named Urabe no Suetake and Usui Sadamitsu, and by the former Kaidomaru, who is now dignified with the name Sakata no Kintoki and who is always shown in prints (and on the stage) as a burly and choleric warrior with a red face. (These four together were popularly known, in an allusion to Buddhist mythology, as The Four Guardian Kings.)

Two of them pass the time by playing go. A goblin appears, sent by the King of Demons (apparently one of Tsuchigumo's titles) to take advantage of Raiko's weakness and kill him. This creature is usually depicted in prints as having three eyes and a long tongue. In the most famous treatment of the subject, Kuniyoshi's great triptych published around 1843 (see Print 6-4), a whole troop of spooks takes shape as if out of a nightmare. Raiko wakes in the nick of time, however, and cuts off the principal demon's leg (see left panel of Print 6-12), whereupon they all vanish. Again Watanabe and his companions follow a trail of blood deep into a cave where they find a huge spider, Tsuchigumo himself. They manage to kill it, and Raiko quickly recovers.

The classic Noh play Tsuchigumo, based on these legends, is divided into two scenes. In the first, the spider, disguised as a sympathetic monk, visits the ailing Raiko. When it begins to spin a web Raiko realizes its true nature and slashes the creature with his sword, whereupon it vanishes. In the second scene, his retainers follow the trail to the spider's cave and destroy it.

This play was adapted as a dance drama for the kabuki stage by the great playwright Kawatake Mokuami in 1881, under the same title, and this is the version familiar to most theatergoers today. A popular moment in the staging of both the Noh drama and the kabuki play occurs when the disguised Tsuchigumo flings out long coils of paper that unravel all over the stage, very dramatically entrapping everyone in a tangled web.

Earlier plays that made use of the spider-as-beautiful-woman theme include the dance-drama Waga Seko no Koi no Aizuchi (Responding to the Siren's Call), by Sakurada Jisuke, staged at the Nakamura Theater in Edo in 1781, and a history play, Yama Mata Yama Oyozume-Banashi (The Tale of a Noble Guardman), by Segawa Joko II, staged at the Tamagawa Theater in Edo in 1818 (see Print 6-1).

Apparition of the Spider Princess

Print 6-11, Kiseido Publishing; Tokyo Japan

Oban diptych by Yoshitoshi Tsukioka, published by Kobayashi Tetsujiro in1886.

Sakata no Kintoki, one of Raiko's retainers, has been dozing with his head on the go board. He suspiciously opens his eyes as a seductive woman -- actually an apparition created by the Ground Spider -- glides by on her errand of mischief. An unusual conception showing Yoshitoshi's fresh approach to traditional themes.