Manago is the serpent-demon of “The Lust of the White Serpent” (Jasei no In) in Ugetsu Monogatari, Akinari’s reworking of the Chinese White Snake legend (Madame White). In the shape of a beautiful woman she comes to the young man Toyoo and vows her love, but her true form is a great snake fixated on a human. Driven off, she returns, and even passes into another woman’s body rather than let him go.
In the end a priest of Dōjō-ji subdues and seals Manago with an iron alms-bowl and his power. The horror lies not in violence but in an obsession that death cannot cut, which must take form and return. That the thing which should have ended does not, but transfers and continues, shares a register with our world’s concern with proliferation.