First of all the name of a bird — toratsugumi, White’s thrush, whose thin descending call at night is recorded in a chronicle of 712 and used by the Man’yōshū poets as a fixed figure for weeping that is kept inside. In the Heike monogatari a creature shot down from the roof of the imperial palace is described as having the head of a monkey, the body of a tanuki, the tail of a snake and the limbs of a tiger, and the text says that its cry resembled a nue. Later in the same book the comparison has become the creature’s name, and it has stayed attached ever since.