Datsue-ba

Datsue-ba appears neither in the Konjaku Monogatari-shū nor in the Nihon Ryōiki: her text is the Bussetsu Jizō Bosatsu Hosshin Innen Jūō-kyō, an apocryphal sutra composed in Japan at the end of the twelfth century on the model of the Chinese sutra of the Ten Kings. There, in the hall of the second king, Shokō-ō, the passage runs: before the court stands a great tree called Eryōju, and in its shade dwell two demons, one named Datsue-ba and the other Keneō. She is one of those two, and the crossing she watches is the Sōzu river, better known as Sanzu no Kawa. Half a century earlier the Hokke Genki (1043) already carried an old-woman demon with the same office, so the figure is older than the text that names her. Yanagita Kunio read her whole cult as a far older devotion, that of the uba-gami or ancestral crone, absorbed into the Buddhist geography of the afterlife.

The dead are buried with six coins, the rokumonsen, to pay for the crossing. Whoever brings them passes. Whoever does not is stripped by Datsue-ba, and Keneō hangs the garment on the branches of the Eryōju: the branch bends according to the weight of the faults of the one who wore it, and that measure, not the old woman's opinion, is what reaches the court. The manner of crossing is read too: over the bridge those who owe little, through the shallows the middling, through the deep current the rest. Lafcadio Hearn, who set down in 1894 the version told in Izumo, puts the toll at three rin and notes that the old woman lives on that bank with her husband. And there is a grimmer variant the sources do not hide: whoever arrives with no clothes to take has the skin taken instead.

On the stony bank of the Sai no Kawara the dead children pile towers of stones for their parents, and the towers fall again and again. It is not she who knocks them down: it is the oni, and the one who comes is Jizō, who hides the little ones in his sleeves and takes them across. The confusion is old and understandable, since the old woman's ford and the children's shore lie on the same passage, but the texts assign the parts and they should not be run together. There is besides a far more recent layer worth dating. Between 1848 and 1854 the image of Datsue-ba at the Shōjuin temple in Edo became an object of popular devotion: people asked her to cure their coughs and, once healed, offered her cotton, until the statue was buried in it and earned the name «the cotton granny». Utagawa Kuniyoshi drew her then blue-skinned in a yellow robe, more obliging than fearsome. From that same period comes the notion that she is the wife of King Enma, which no sutra says.