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SUMMARY
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The Repentant Snake-Demoness
TSUTSUMI Kunihiko
A woman who falls in love with a young monk on a pilgrimage becomes so obsessed with him that
she turns into a snake. This oral tradition of Dojoji Temple in Kii Province (now Wakayama
Prefecture) has its origins in several ancient texts including Hokke Genki [Miraculous Tales of
the Lotus Sutra]. The story was embroidered in medieval Noh dramas and early modern plays, fiction, songs, and art, forming a continuous thread in Japanese literary and cultural history that
came to be known as the “Dojoji-mono” genre. In particular, the early modern versions of the
story, by making the heroine Kiyohime a young girl, took as their central theme a passion so consuming that it transforms an innocent maiden into a serpent.
As female passion came to be viewed as sinful, both in the mores of the common people and
in the instruction that women increasingly received from Buddhist temples in the medieval and
early modern eras, religious books and moral guides added a new interpretation to the tale by
censuring the serpent-woman’s immorality. In response to these social trends, Kiyohime came to
be portrayed in literature as recognizing and repenting the depth of her passion. In the eighteenth-century joruri ballad Dojoji Genzai Uroko [The Scales of Dojoji, A Modern Version] and
in zappai (comic verses) of the same period, we find a new image of the heroine as a serpentdemoness tormented by love—an image that originated in the popular literature of the early modern era.
The creation of this character later gave rise, in Edo ghost tales, to fictional depictions of the
faithlessness of a cowardly man who flees a love-crazed woman. The introduction of this theme of
male desertion led to the establishment of the literary techniques which were used in Edo ghost
tales to depict the supernatural beauty of “vengeful female spirits.”