All about yokai: The Raijuu
Japanese superstition talks of raijuu burrowing into humans’ belly buttons to sleep or hide.
When picking a yokai to feature in my stories, there are a few ways I go about it. For the raijuu it came via a legend, which in turn inspired the story The Cry of the Raijuu. The legend tells of the samurai Tachibana Dōsetsu who was sheltering under a tree during a storm. As lightning struck, he drew his sword to stop it, and once the smoke had cleared all that was left lay a dead raijuu. From then on he renamed his sword, Chidori, Raikiri which means “lightning cutter”.
When I first read this, I loved it so much and wanted to write it badly. I didn’t want to go from the samurai’s perspective though, I wanted another view, of someone seeing such a great feat. And from this I needed to do a lot of research in both Tachibana Dōsetsu and the raijuu.
So how did I pick my raijuu? First I looked into the most basic information I could find about the lightning beast.
Raijū
雷獣 - らいじゅう
Translation: Thunder beast
I chose the spelling raijuu over raiju or raijū for two reasons. Firstly I was unsure how many people would understand the ū sound, as it’s not used in English. In Japanese it’s in place of an uu (and similarly the ō is in place of ou). I could have gone with the simpler raiju, however I’d love if people could pronounce the name as close to the japanese way, so I chose the full version raijuu.
Next I had to pick what type of animal the raijuu was. It is an embodiment of lightning in an animal form, though they have been likened to wolves, dogs, tanuki, and many other animals including even crustaceans. Other sources spoke of a white and blue wolf or dog wrapped in lightning, with a cry sounding like thunder.
I also looked in one of my favourite books Yokai by Koichi Yumoto and found this picture too.
Deeper research led me also to popular culture and how they approached the raijuu or raijuu inspired creatures and that made me think of two things from my childhood (and adulthood in case of pokemon!). The pokemon Raikou and the digimon Garurumon.
Taking inspiration from it all, I ended up with my raijuu, a white wolf wrapped in blue lightning with black metallic claws which runs along the sky. I decided it can manipulate lightning, run with it, and it is drawn to the metallic nature of the claws. I imagined it’s fur to be coarse and rough, because if it was soft, the static would send mess with the fur. Beneath a coarse layer of fur would be a fluffier layer for warmth, as being high in the sky must be cold. Overall I thought it would be similar to a husky.
For the raijuu’s behaviour, I looked at my research again. It spoke of raijuu leaping around when agitated and striking trees, or creating mayhem wherever they landed. This feared creature comes across as very temperamental and uncontrollable, which fits their master well, Raijin. Raijin, the god of thunder and lightning owns raijuu as pets, and is said to awaken them during thunderstorms.
This leads to a wonderful piece of information I found and desperately wanted to add into my story, but unfortunately I couldn’t do it. Japanese superstition talks of raijuu burrowing into humans’ belly buttons to sleep or hide. And when they are woken up by Raijin, they can hurt the person, so during storms you should sleep on your stomach and/or cover your belly button when you hear thunder.
These feared creatures were quite the mystery to Japanese people, and as they could easily cause much destruction, I made sure to try and convey all that during my story. It was also said that whenever lightning struck, it was believed that a raijuu had been sent by the gods to punish them for some reason.
My poor protagonist ended up with the short straw really, as he wasn’t being punished for anything, he really didn’t do anything wrong. However he battled each challenge well, and Inari was watching with very curious eyes. She isn’t done with him yet.
Want to read all about the raijuu? Meet them now in my story The Cry of the Raijuu.
Never realised raikou had this meaning!