In the sixty-fifth year of the reign of Nintoku, the Nihon shoki reports, there was a man in the province of Hida called Sukuna, so formed that upon a single trunk he had two faces. He would not obey the imperial command. A general was sent against him, and he was put to death.
That is the whole of it in the chronicle — a few lines in the eleventh book, in the register the court used for the parts of the country it had not yet absorbed.
In Hida itself, the mountainous province where the chronicle places him, two Buddhist temples name the same figure as the man who founded them.
The passage belongs to a type, and our note on the tsuchigumo sets out how that type works: the court’s records describe those who did not submit, and the descriptions carry the marks of the describing.
Sukuna’s two faces are the sort of detail that arrives with the category rather than with the man. What is being recorded is a refusal — he would not come when called — and the body is supplied to match. The general sent against him is named. The chronicle is a document of administration, and this is an entry in it.
The chronicle describes the body at some length, and it is worth having in full, because the description is doing something. The two faces were turned away from each other. The crowns met, and there was no nape of the neck. Each face had its own hands and feet; there were knees, but no hollows behind them and no heels. He was strong and quick, wore a sword at either side, and used bow and arrow with all four hands at once. And on that account, the entry continues, he would not obey the imperial command, and took pleasure in plundering the people.
The joint between the two halves of that entry is the whole thing. The body is described, and then comes on that account — the disobedience is presented as following from the anatomy. A man built like that would naturally not come when called.
And the body is well chosen for the purpose. A man with two faces on one trunk cannot be faced. There is no side of him that is the front, no position from which he can be addressed and no position from which he can be surprised. For a chronicle whose subject in these entries is precisely whether a person will present himself when summoned, it is a well-chosen body.
A second early source, a chronological history compiled later, carries the same event in Chinese in almost the same words, which establishes that the account was copied and circulated rather than invented once. It does not establish anything about Sukuna.
Senkōji, in what is now Takayama, states its own origin plainly on its own pages: the temple was opened by Ryōmen Sukuna, a powerful man of Hida, in the reign of Nintoku, some sixteen hundred years ago, as a place of prayer in the older religion. A Buddhist temple was built there about twelve hundred years ago; the founding it claims is older and is his.
Nichiryūbuzan, in the same region, gives a temple tradition in which Sukuna subdued a dragon that had been doing harm in the district, and built a shrine on the mountain where the dragon had lived. That is where the temple dates itself from.
In one record he is a plunderer who would not obey. In the other he is the man who dealt with the thing that was harming everybody. Same person, same century, same province.
The temptation is to decide which is true, and it should be resisted.
The chronicle is a court document written down in the eighth century about an event it places in the fifth. The temple accounts are institutional traditions, recorded far later, by establishments with an interest in an ancient founder. Neither is testimony. Both are claims, made by bodies with something to gain, several centuries after anything that might have happened.
What can be said is that the two claims are made about the same man from two directions, and that the direction is the variable. Seen from the capital, a local power who would not submit is a monster with too many faces. Seen from the valley, the same local power is the one who opened the mountain.
It is worth adding that the temples are not disputing the chronicle. They do not say he was wronged, or that the court lied, or that he was never killed. They simply begin their own histories with him and carry on, which is what institutions do with a founder. The disagreement was never staged, and that is part of why it has lasted: nobody in Hida has had to defend a position, because nobody in the capital has asked.
This is not a dead dispute preserved in books. Hida has gone on with its version.
There are images of Sukuna in temples of the district, including one carved in the manner of the wandering monk-sculptor Enkū, whose rough hacked figures are a Hida speciality and who left thousands of them across these mountains. And since 2001 the town of Nyūkawa has held an autumn festival named for Sukuna, at which prayers are offered for the harvest.
A figure the eighth-century court disposed of in a few lines is, in the twenty-first century, the name on a harvest festival in the province it disposed of him from. Note what the festival is for. Not remembrance, not a grievance, not anything that could be called a counter-history: the rice crop. He has been folded into the calendar of ordinary local business, which is a more complete kind of survival than being remembered as a victim.
Many readers will have arrived at this name from a recent manga, and there is no reason to be coy about that. This note does not deal with it, because it has nothing to add: the modern character borrows a name and a number of faces and goes its own way, which is what fiction is for.
What is worth having is the older situation the name came out of. The oldest text about Sukuna was written by the side that killed him, in the vocabulary it used for people it had not yet absorbed. Everything else about him was written by his neighbours.
One reading is that the temples are simply wrong and have adopted a local villain for prestige.
The more useful reading is that there is no neutral record here at all, and that noticing this is the whole gain. The chronicle is not a report interrupted by bias; it is an instrument for classifying the unsubmitted, and Sukuna’s second face is part of the classification. The temple traditions are not folk memory surviving against the odds; they are institutions dating themselves as early as they can.
Two interested parties, no disinterested one, and a man with two faces standing where they meet. It would be difficult to design a better emblem for the problem, and the fact that the emblem was designed by one of the parties is the last thing to keep in mind about it.
The reading in “What This Kind of Case Is Good For” is KWAIDANOTE’s own.
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