 The father of the children initially considers their condition to be preordained as "retribution" for something they did in their past lives, as part of a Buddhist worldview.Pflugfelder says that in the original text, the siblings' condition is not labelled definitively — where Willig adds "confusion of sexual identity", the original text says merely "such a condition".The tengu were considered at the time to be evil, and the enemies of Buddhism.