“The Blue Hood” (Aozukin) is a tale of Ugetsu Monogatari in which the abbot of a mountain temple in Shimotsuke, driven mad with grief when the boy he loved dies of illness, devours the corpse and at last digs up graves to eat human flesh, becoming a flesh-eating demon. Night after night the village is tormented by the fiend.
A passing Zen master, Kaian, sets a blue hood on his head and leaves him a single line of a koan. Returning a year later, he finds only bones and the blue hood in that place. That fall — mourning turned to appetite, the holy turned to a starving monster — connects to our world’s concern with the corruption and transformation that change a person, by degrees, into something else.