What carried Kyūsenbō’s name into the world was Kikuoka Senryō’s Honchō Zokugenshi (Enkyō 3, c. 1746)^[1]. The tale it tells runs thus: the nine thousand kappa that infested the Kuma River kept dragging people under, until at last they drowned a beloved page of Katō Kiyomasa, lord of Higo. Enraged, Kiyomasa gathered from across Kyushu the monkeys the kappa most feared, and set them on the clan all at once. Kyūsenbō could not even put up a proper fight, and was driven from the Kuma River.

With nowhere left to go, the kappa clan was permitted to move to the Chikugo River through the mediation of Arima, lord of Kurume, on condition that they do no harm to people or livestock. Thereafter Kyūsenbō and his familiars served the Suitengū shrine at Kurume, turning into guardians who shielded the people from the floods of the Chikugo. That Suitengū to this day hands out kappa masks and amulets owes to this bond. Yet Kyūsenbō is not among the deities Suitengū formally enshrines (Emperor Antoku and others); he is, at most, a kappa familiar who guards the shrine.

There are also those who place the clan’s homeland not at the Yellow River in China but in a crossing during the reign of Emperor Nintoku, or in some far river of Central Asia — but these are later embellishments. In modern times the novelist Hino Ashihei, born in Kitakyushu, loved the kappa as the theme of his life and spread Kyūsenbō through works such as Kappa Mandara^[3]. In 1955, the “Kyūsenbō Honzan Tanushimaru Kappa Clan” that Ashihei and his fellows founded at Tanushimaru in Chikugo was a cultural movement built upon this legend — the Kyūsenbō tradition, carried down since Edo, thus passing into the town-building of today. At Yatsushiro stands a monument to the “Place of the Kappa’s Arrival,” still telling of his memory as the chief of Kyushu’s kappa.