Shuten-dōji.

Shuten-dōji appears as the grand lord of oni, larger, more courtly, and more terrifying than ordinary demons. In the oldest surviving Ōeyama Ekotoba tradition he is described in monstrous, almost impossible terms: a red body, multiple horns, many eyes, and limbs of different colors, a form that makes him feel less like a single body than a concentration of all demonic excess. Later paintings and prints retain that excess while reshaping him into a charismatic mountain tyrant, often enthroned amid cups, captives, and retainers.

His name ties him to intoxication, and that detail matters visually as well as narratively. Shuten-dōji is not just a brute. He presides over banquets of inversion, where aristocratic hospitality is twisted into cannibal feasting and sake becomes both pleasure and trap. He can therefore look lordly and savage at the same time, a demon ruler whose splendor is inseparable from blood and predation.

Shuten-dōji's defining interaction with humans is organized abduction. In the legend, people disappear from Kyoto until court divination identifies the culprit in the mountains. He and his band seize women, devour human flesh, drink blood, and turn the route between capital and upland wilderness into a corridor of fear. The response is equally organized: Minamoto no Yorimitsu, often called Raikō, advances with his retainers under imperial command, aided by shrine or divine powers, and enters the demon's lair through deception rather than open assault.

That structure makes Shuten-dōji central to a very specific social drama. He is not merely a monster encountered by chance, but an anti-political force that humiliates the capital by making it porous. His defeat restores hierarchy, yet the tale keeps some moral friction alive. In several versions the demon protests the warriors' trickery, and his severed head continues to attack after death, suggesting a power that remains dangerous even once victory has been declared.