Speaking thus in the courteous tone of one who has made a fool of somebody, the Devil deliberately made the cattle dealer a very polite bow.
The cattle dealer regretted that he had fallen into the Devil’s trap so carelessly. If he left things as they were, he would finally be seized by that “shag-pate” and have to burn body and soul in the everlasting fires of hell. Then his having forsaken his former religion and having been baptized would be of no avail.
Since, however, he had sworn in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, he could not break the promise he had made. Of course if St. Francis had only been there, something might have been done yet, but unfortunately he was away. Then for three days, during which he could not sleep a wink, he tried to think how to outwit the Devil. To do so, there was absolutely no way but to learn the name of the plant. But where could there be anybody who knew a name unknown even to St. Francis?
Finally, on the last night, the cattle dealer, again leading his yellow cow, stole up to the house in which the Brother lived. It stood beside the field facing the road. When he got there, it seemed that the Brother had already gone to bed, and no light shone from the windows. There was a moon, but it was a hazy night, and here and there in the lonely field the purple flowers showed faintly and lonesomely in the gloom. Of course the cattle dealer had finally crept up here because he had thought of a sort of doubtful plan, but as soon as he saw this quiet scene, he was somehow afraid and felt that it might be best to go back home as he was. Especially when he thought of that demon in the house with horns like a goat’s, perhaps dreaming of the Inferno, all the courage he had worked up melted weakly away. But when he thought of handing himself over, body and soul, to that shag-pate, of course it was no time to squeal and give up.
So the cattle dealer, beseeching the help of the Virgin Mary, boldly carried out the plan he had formed. It was no very great plan. It was only to take off the halter of the yellow cow he was leading and, beating her roundly behind, drive her madly into the field.
The cow, jumping with the pain, broke down the fence and trampled the field. She ran against the weatherboarding of the house with her horns many times. And the noise of her hoofs and her bellowing, stirred the light mist of the night and echoed fearfully through the neighborhood. Then somebody opened a window shutter and stuck out his head. Because of the darkness the face was not recognizable, but it was surely that of the Devil in the form of the Brother. It may have been nerves, but the horns on his head were distinctly visible even in the night.
“You dirty cur, you, what do you mean by tearing up my tobacco field?” yelled the Devil in a sleepy voice, shaking his fist. He seemed extremely angry at being disturbed just after falling asleep.
But to the cattle dealer, who was hiding and watching on the other side of the field, these words of the Devil sounded like the voice of his God.
“You dirty cur, you, what do you mean by tearing up my tobacco field?”
After that everything ended most harmoniously, as always in stories of this kind. The cattle dealer guessed the name “tobacco” successfully and got the best of the Devil. And he took all the tobacco growing in the field. Thus ends the story.
But I have always wondered whether this tradition may not have in it a deeper meaning. For though the Devil was not able to make the cattle dealer’s body and soul his own, he managed instead to disseminate tobacco throughout all Japan. Wherefore, as the escape of the cattle dealer was coupled with his fall, was not the failure of the Devil accompanied by success? Though the Devil falls, he does not simply rise again. May it not be true that when a man thinks he has won out against temptation he finds to his surprise that he has met defeat?
And here let me add a brief account of what became of the Devil after that. When St. Francis came back, he was finally driven off of the land by the virtue of the holy pentagram. But he seems to have wandered about here and there after that still disguised as a Brother. In a certain record, he is said to have appeared occasionally in Kyoto at about the time of the erection of the temple Nambanji. There is also a theory that Kashin Koji, the notorious fellow who made sport of Matsunaga Danjo, was the Devil, but since this has already been written about by Lafcadio Hearn, I shall not repeat it here. And then when the foreign religion was prohibited by Toyotomi and Tokugawa, he still showed himself at first, but finally in the end he left Japan altogether. The records give practically no further information on the Devil. Only it is exceedingly regrettable that we are unable to learn of his movements since he came back to Japan a second time after the Restoration of Meiji.
There was nobody at Ike-no-O who did not know about the nose of Zenchi Naigu. It was five or six inches long and hung down from above his upper lip to below his chin. As for its shape, it was equally thick at base and tip. A long and slender sausage, so to speak, dangled from the middle of his face.
The Naigu, who was over fifty, had always grieved in secret at this nose of his from the far-off days when he
