The Long Nose

The tengu everyone pictures — red-faced, long-nosed, in a mountain ascetic's cap and stole, holding a feather fan — is the late form. Japanese tradition had tied the figure to the yamabushi, the mountain ascetics, by the thirteenth century, and the long nose appears in the fourteenth, generally read as the beak turning human. The character changes with the face. A bird that stole monks becomes a mountain lord who is dangerous, proud, easy to offend, and keeps his word — and who, from this point, has something worth learning from him.