The monster that shouldn't exist. The nue is wrongness made flesh - monkey head with wild eyes and bared fangs, tiger limbs striped and clawed, raccoon dog body, and a serpent coiling where its tail should be. Every part stolen from a different creature, assembled into something that hunts in darkness and screams like wind through a graveyard. Emperor Konoe heard it crying from the clouds night after night until he sent his greatest archer to shoot it down.

Kuniyoshi renders it mid-prowl, golden fur rippling with black stripes, that snake tail whipping upward in blue and rust patterns. The creature moves with predatory grace despite being an impossible combination of parts. Its expression is fierce and alert, the face almost human in its intelligence, which makes it more unsettling. This is from Kuniyoshi's Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaidō Road series, where he paired scenic travel locations with legendary moments and creatures.

The nue represents everything that violates natural order - a yokai so infamous it became shorthand for "thing that defies explanation." When something couldn't be categorized or understood in Edo-period Japan, people called it a nue. Kuniyoshi gives it solid form, makes it real and tangible, proves that sometimes the most terrifying monsters are the ones that break all the rules.

A Nue (鵺, Chimera), from the series Kisokaidō rokujūkyū tsugi no uchi (木曾街道六十九次之内, Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaidō Road) 1852.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi (歌川国芳, 1798-1861)