The Tanuki Who Tricked Itself

The tanuki lives in the mountain above the road.

He is a large specimen, self-satisfied, with a belly like a drum and a pair of legendary testicles that feature in Edo-period art for reasons that are funnier in context than they sound in summary. He has learned to shape-shift from watching the foxes, though he will never admit the foxes do it better. He has learned to drum on his belly to summon thunder, which he uses to confuse travelers. He has learned that humans are pleasingly susceptible to the appearance of wealth.

He has also learned, though he has not fully processed the lesson, that his transformations are impermanent.

---

The merchant comes down the mountain road in the late afternoon with an empty pack and a successful trading day behind him. The tanuki watches from the tree above the road and makes a calculation. The merchant is the prosperous kind — not aristocratic, not poor, but the newly comfortable Edo sort who believes in good fortune the way a gambler believes in hot streaks.

The tanuki transforms himself into a pile of gold coins on the path.

The merchant sees the coins. He stops. He picks one up, bites it, feels its weight, bites it again. Gold. He looks around — no one watching. He picks them all up. He counts them — fifteen ryo, a significant sum — and packs them away and walks home at a faster pace than he arrived.

The tanuki, having turned himself into fifteen gold coins, is now fifteen separate pieces of one tanuki, distributed in a merchant’s money pouch, which is an uncomfortable situation. He holds his shape through the night.

---

In the morning the merchant counts his coins before breakfast.

They are leaves.

This is the part of the tanuki trick that the tanuki did not fully think through: the transformation holds for a while, usually through a night, but the tanuki cannot maintain fifteen separate fragments of himself in coin form past the point where counting and daylight and the serious attention of a money-minded person are applied simultaneously.

The merchant is angry. He goes to the mountain to look for the fox he believes has tricked him — tanuki and fox are often confused by their victims. He finds the tanuki sitting in a persimmon tree eating fruit and looking guilty.

The tanuki, caught, makes a new offer: it will become a teakettle, which the monk of the mountain temple can use, and in exchange for not being beaten it will boil water reliably for the rest of the year. This offer, in most versions of the story, is accepted.

The tanuki as a teakettle is the character’s natural resolution: the shape-shifter most useful when it has given up on trickery and settled into the service of something domestic. The temple teakettle version of the tanuki heats water, never tricks anyone, and apparently finds this satisfying.

The round ceramic tanuki statues that sit outside Japanese restaurants and sake shops are almost always depicted with coins in one hand and a sake bottle in the other, outside the house rather than in it, still trying to lure the prosperous inside with the promise of good fortune.

The coins might be real.

They might be leaves.

The light in the morning will tell you which.