For twelve centuries the story of En no Gyoja has furnished material for Japanese storytellers, historians, poets and dramatists, as well as a paradigm for practitioners of religious austerities on the sacred mountains of Japan. This is a study of the unfolding of the tale of this mountain holy man in the literature of Japan, from the eighth-century chronicle Shoku Nihongi to Tsubouchi Shoyo's early twentieth-century works.

Chapter I focuses on the two earliest accounts of En no Gyoja, found in the Shoku Nihongi and the Nihon Ryoiki, and emphasizes the historical context out of which the legend arose. Chapters II and III trace the story through the literature of the next millennium, noting an increasing bifurcation between popular and religious lineages. Organized groups of mountain ascetics, practitioners of Shugendo, had by the Muromachi Period officially adopted En no Gyoja as founder, and laudatory tales of his holy life and miracles are seen in their rituals and doctrinal works. Meanwhile, more secular historical and literary works preserved older versions of the legend, while popular storytellers and playwrights embellished the tale for purposes of entertainment.

Between 1913 and 1932, Tsubouchi Shoyo--known as a pioneer in the modernization of Japanese fiction and translator of Shakespeare--wrote three dramatic works and a prose narrative based on the En no Gyoja tradition. Chapters IV and V deal with this neglected area of Shoyo's work, showing how he modified the themes of the traditional legend, and suggesting that in these works he may have been admonishing his contemporaries to be confident in their own tradition in the face of seductive--potentially destructive--influences from abroad. The Appendix includes a translation of Shoyo's drama En no Gyoja and a summary of his prose work Jinpen Daibosatsu-Den (An Account of the Great Bodhisattva Jinpen).