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This is taken from the manga Doraemon - of which I'm sure most people are familiar with so in explaining the context I hope you don't think I'm crazy..

Having eaten a transforming biscuit that turned him into a cockerel, a man complains about a prank phone call he just took:

"だれかの　いたずらだ、　トサカに　くる"

Translating that literally hasn't enabled me to understand the joke. Can anyone shed some light?

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In Japanese the phrase 「頭にくる」 is an idiom used to mean "get angry." 「トサカにくる」 is a slang version of that that emphasizes just how cheesed off you are. トサカ (=鶏冠) is the red part at the top of a chicken/rooster's head. Notice how it goes up through the head and kind of flares out. Because of how silly the image is, though, you'd use it at a time when a kind of silly playfulness is involved. According to this site it might refer to the redness of the chicken as blood rushing to your head.

Apparently when you're seriously angry and just have to express it through a bodily extremity, you can use 「怒髪天{どはつてん}を衝{つ}く」.

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    Very interesting! The last one makes for a particularly intriguing translation. Are they phrases more commonly used to describe ones own anger? I've rarely heard anything besides variations of 怒る.
    – solent
    Commented Sep 3, 2014 at 15:42
  • Do you really use those expressions yourself?
    – user4032
    Commented Sep 4, 2014 at 14:04
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    @非回答者 No, this answer is based entirely on stuff I found elsewhere. I'm not making any claims here about how common any of these are.
    – ssb
    Commented Sep 4, 2014 at 14:17
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    @非回答者 do you have any other issues with this answer except for (what I assume) the obscurity of the expressions themselves? Does something seem wrong to you?
    – ssb
    Commented Sep 4, 2014 at 14:26

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