Shuten-dōji is the chieftain of a band of oni — demons — in Japanese legend, said to have been killed by the hero Minamoto no Raikō. Even decapitated, his severed head still lunged to bite the hero, who escaped death only by wearing several helmets stacked one atop another. His lair is placed at Mount Ōe northwest of Kyoto, or at Mount Ibuki.
The oldest surviving text of the legend is the fourteenth-century Ōeyama Ekotoba, and he is drawn as a being who drinks human blood like sake. The historian Masaaki Takahashi reads the cave at Mt. Ōe as a boundary between the living and the dead and ties the legend to the smallpox epidemic of 994. A head that keeps biting even after death meets our world’s dread of an end that will not seal.