Who Is The Darkness in the Storehouse (The Oni) (Oni hitokuchi)?
The demon that swallowed a woman whole
The Oni
The oni of Akutagawa is the being that is said to devour a woman in one gulp inside a ruined storehouse in section 6 of The Tales of Ise, "Akutagawa." The original text never describes what it looks like.
In Episode 1, while the man stands guard at the storehouse door, the woman cries out "Ah!" (anaya), but the thunder drowns out her voice and he never hears it. At dawn she is gone. A later passage of the original explains the mystery: the "oni" were really her brothers, Fujiwara no Mototsune and Kunitsune, who took her back.
In Japanese, a person swallowed and gone in an instant is called "oni hitokuchi" (one bite of the oni), and this story is the classic example.
