The Dutch sailor known as "Oni" washes ashore in feudal Japan following a tempest that obliterates his ship. Isolated by language and foreign features, he crafts a survival strategy: impersonating the fearsome oni of local lore. He sculpts a grotesque mask, stains his skin crimson, and engineers monstrous footprints to amplify the illusion. Villagers, steeped in superstition, recoil from the spectral menace they believe haunts their shores. His deception arises not from cruelty but desperation—their terror of his otherness and his inability to bridge their dialect force him deeper into the charade. When hostility escalates into organized hunts, the sailor leans further into his fabricated demonhood, weaponizing their myths to shield himself. Centuries later, his modern-day descendant—a scholar piecing together a faded photograph—uncovers ties between the sailor’s stranded years and the Momotarō legend. The discovery unravels a temporal paradox: the sailor’s struggle to survive unwittingly molds the very folklore that future time-travelers reference, entangling his existence with the myth’s origins. This inversion of the oni archetype frames demonhood as a mask of survival, not innate malevolence. His tale becomes a lens for cultural collisions—how fear transmutes foreignness into folklore, and how self-preservation can etch unintended legacies into history’s fabric, leaving the sailor a casualty of both circumstance and the stories born from his strife.