What are the Origins of Yama-uba?

Yama-uba are a type of kijo, meaning that they were once human, but they were corrupted, causing them to transform into scary creatures. Kijo (鬼女) are a type of Oni, or demon woman, that are typically younger. The process of a woman turning into a yama-uba can vary and be caused by several different things. One way of transforming into a yama-uba can occur when a woman has been accused of doing evil deeds and she flees into the wilderness, living a life of exile. She slowly turns into a yama-uba over many years as she gets older. Another way of becoming a yama-uba can actually be due to famine. There is a tradition that if there is not enough food to feed every person in a family, one or two members of the family was removed for everyone else to survive. Typically, the one sacrificed was either the youngest of the family, or the oldest of the family. Sometimes family members would take their senile old mothers out into the forest to die, which caused these women to become very angry. This would sometimes lead to them transforming into a monster out of rage that would eat humans to survive, therefore creating a yama-uba.

Folklore about Yama-uba

The tales of yama-uba were originally spoke of in the Konjaku Monogatari (今昔物語). This is a collection of Japanese folklore, containing over one thousand stories about different yokai, ghosts and fables. It has 31 volumes, which contain stories from all over Asia such as Japanese, Chinese and Indian folklore.

Like most yokai folktales, accounts of yama-uba interactions have been passed down from generation to generation as they became common knowledge by Japanese people. Stories about yama-uba are often used to discipline young children into behaving as bedtime tales.

There is a story about yama-uba in which she meets young men in the mountains and gives them a baby to test how he would respond to it, telling him that she would leave him alone with the baby and return to observe how he did. While she was away from the man, the baby would become very, very heavy. If the man succumbed under the weight of the baby and could not hold it, it would transform into a rock and completely crush him. However, if he was able to endure the weight of the baby and hold it up, when she returns to him she rewards him with superhuman strength. This strength was to be hereditary, meaning that he would pass it on to his children, and to children from generations after them (Ashkenazi, 290).

Another depiction of yama-uba, one in which she eats people, would be the mythical story of the happyaku bikuni. This is an eight-hundred-year-old nun that wanders around the mountains with everlasting youth. Her youth is gained from eating servants of the sea deities (Ashkenazi, 290).

These yokai typically live in huts in the mountains and lure travelers to stay the night at their place. Once the human guests are asleep, the yama-uba transforms into a monster and eats them. Yama-uba’s victims were typically men delivering things like fish traveling on mountain trails. Other victims include pregnant women that are ashamed to be pregnant that wander into the woods to give birth when an old woman lures them away to ‘help’ them deliver their baby. Soon after she gives birth the yama-uba devours her and the baby.

In the tale of Ushikata to yamauba (牛方と山姥 ), or Ox-Cart Puller and Mountain Witch yama-uba seeks out to devour anything that she can. She sees a man with an ox cart carrying fish and demands to eat the fish, and then the ox, and then she wishes to eat the man himself, but he runs away, unfortunately ending up at yama-uba’s hut. Surprisingly enough, he ends up being able to defeat her. Some interpretations of this folklore say that her corpse transforms into carrots, which are beneficial to the human beings. In this tale yama-uba is seen as both beneficial and destructive. Obviously, it is bad that she tried to eat the man, but in the end, he was able to actually eat her instead (Reider, 240).

In the folklore of Tentomsan kin no kusari (天道さん金の鎖), or Golden Chain of Heaven, yama-uba is once again defeated by her prey. In this tale, yama-uba decides to eat children of a house while their mother is gone. Although she eats a baby, the other siblings escape by climbing a golden chain that leads to heaven. Yama-uba tries to follow them but she slips and falls onto a pile of buckwheat, bleeding all over it and turning it red. This is important because it provides a supernatural explanation as to why buckwheat is red (Reider, 241).

What is a Crone?

In Japanese folklore the character of a crone is an old woman. They can be described as anywhere from being sinister and malicious to being wise and helpful, depending on the type of crone it is. Yama-uba is a mountain crone, meaning that she haunts the mountains in Japan and preys on the humans that enter it.

What Works are Yama-uba Featured in?

Yama-uba is represented in a noh play called Yamanba. The main character Hyakuma-yamamba, a dancer making a pilgrimage from Kyoto to Zenkō-ji Temple in Shinano Providence. Her name comes from her storytelling dance about a yamamba (or a mountain crone) that inhabits the mountains. On their journey the main character tries to cross Mount Agero by foot when it suddenly becomes dark and an old lady appears in front of them, offering them a place to stay for the night. This old lady then confesses to her guests that she is really a mountain crone, and proceeds to request Hyakuma-yamamba to dance to her crone song. She also told them that she was responsible for the sudden darkness that had happened, which she did in order to lure the girl into dancing for her. Hyakuma-yamamba begun to perform the dance but the mountain hag stopped her, announcing that she would show them her true form when it was the middle of the night, and then she disappeared. Eventually when it was late enough the mountain hag reappeared with her true identity and preached to them about her days living in the mountain gorges as a mountain crone and about the Buddhist ways of life. While doing this, she performed a dance about crones and then vanished once and for all (the-noh.com). I think that in some ways this noh play represents Yama-uba teaching Buddhist laws in order for the audience to be scared of her in an attempt to urge them to obey these laws. Karma from a past life is needed for a traveler to meet a mountain crone, meaning that the young dancer must have done something good to deserve this in a past life. Typically, crones are depicted as being evil or causing terror, but in this play the crone was illustrated as nostalgic and graceful. This suggests that Yama-uba’s image in this play was being wise, rather than being evil like some depictions of her are.

Yama-uba was also featured in the The Illustrated Night Parade of a Hundred Demons or Gazu Hyakki Yagyō (画図百鬼夜行). The name of this work is based on an idiom hyakki yagyō, which translates to pandemonium in English, implying that the yokai are disastrous. This work includes famous illustrations from Toriyama Sekien with Yama-uba’s illustration featured in yin yokai volume. The book depicts popular ghosts and yokai in woodblock print illustrations. The illustration of yama-uba shows her looking disheveled amongst the trees behind her.

How the Image of Yama-uba Shifted Over the Centuries

This yokai was depicted in Medieval Japan as being synonymous with the female Oni (鬼). During this time period she was predominantly seen in a negative light as a witch. However, as the 17^th century drew to an end she was considered to be more like a motherly figure (Reider, 240). The shift in depicting yama-uba over time reflects how society viewed women as a whole depending on what century a piece of folklore was written. This shift seems to indicate that earlier on in time society had an image of women that tended to get better over time.

In the noh play about yama-uba, she seems to be self-conscious about her true appearance, promising to only reveal it in the dead of night. This noh play was very popular during the 16^th century, which could imply that this particular image of the yama-uba could have influenced the way people illustrated her in the 17^th century (Reider, 244). Her appearance suggested that old and ugly were equated something as being evil.

Another work that Yama-uba’s image is illustrated through is a kabuki play from the Edo period called Komochi yamauba (嫗山姥 ), or Mountain Witch with a Child. The play features a woman that gets transformed into a supernatural being to carry a child that with the help of Raiko will help get revenge on the man that killed the male protagonist’s father. Contrary to most depictions of yama-uba, even though the female lead is turned into the yokai, she is still depicted as being beautiful. Despite having horns, she is drastically less hideous than previous works that feature yama-uba such as the Yamanba noh play (Reider, 251). It is interesting that she is so tamely depicted in this work, considering that it was from the 17^th century, which was a time when society was at a height for depicting yama-uba as hideous. Perhaps this is because in this play yama-uba was transformed from the main character’s wife, and not just some old lady found in the woods. This would imply that the image of yama-uba was disconnected from how society viewed wives. The contrast would be that the yama-uba were potentially ugly old women while their views of their wives were maintained as beautiful, making the two depictions of women completely separated.

Adaptations of Yama-uba in Modern Culture

The closest depiction of a yama-uba-like character in modern Western culture would be the witch from the tale of Hansel and Gretel. The two children are walking in the forest alone, when they meet an old lady, much like the way travelers met yama-uba in Japanese folklore. Then she proceeded to eat them, just like yama-uba also ate children. Although I do not think that the story is based off of the stories about the yokai, I think it is interesting to observe similar archetypes across different cultures, and how the people react to them.

In the late 1990’s there was a fashion movement across Japanese youth called ganguro (ガングロ) fashion. This movement was popular mainly amongst women. It originates as an act of rebellion against traditional Japanese ideals, which encouraged the self-expression of individuality. The trend included having bleached hair, tanned skin, white and black eyeliner and brightly colored clothes and drawing on a second mouth with makeup. There are theories that this trend was meant to resemble yama-uba through the use of bleaching one’s hair, the tan skin, and drawing on a second mouth, which are all characteristics of the yokai. This trend was considered controversial in a lot of ways, because the term ganguro means ‘black face,’ which is racist in Western cultures, but it is argued that the trend was not actually racist at all, instead it could have been a simple coincidence.