The night parade of a hundred demons — known now as a painted scroll, but in the writing that precedes the paintings it does three other things. It is a category a frightened witness reaches for: in a tale of the early thirteenth century a man sees one figure in the rain, as tall as the eaves and with a horse’s head, chanting a verse on impermanence, and thinks that this may be the hyakki yagyō. It is a set of dates on which one did not go out at night, with a recorded danger for those who ignored them. And it is an address: buildings in the capital were called the demon hall and the demon place, in a tale collection and in a court official’s diary of 1035.