Yamauba

The yamauba is the supernatural old woman who dwells deep in the mountains, and in the north of the country her stories are told alongside those of the yamahaha, whom the people of Tōno held to be the same figure. It is often read that she was born of ubasute, the custom of abandoning old women on the mountain during famines; it is worth saying that this custom is not documented as an actual practice. It is legendary material, and the man who said so was precisely Yanagita Kunio, who traced the motif back to Buddhist tale-lore of Indian origin. What the sources do sustain is something else, and older: that behind the yamauba stands a degraded figure of the mountain cult, the woman who served the god of the mountain and whom the passing centuries turned into a devourer. Hence her double nature, which is not a contradiction in the tale but its starting point: the mountain feeds and the mountain kills, and she is both at once.

The regional descriptions agree on little, but they agree on this: she is tall, with very long hair and strikingly white skin, her mouth split as far as the ears and her gaze sharply bright. Some traditions add a second mouth on the crown of her head, hidden beneath the hair, and it is this feature that gets her confused with the futakuchi-onna, the two-mouthed woman, to whom the snake-like hair that serves as hands properly belongs. The yamauba does not fight: she deceives. Her resource is hospitality, the lit fire and the hot bowl offered to the lost traveller, and so her true power is the change of appearance, the passing for a harmless old woman until she need not any longer. In the tales she also transforms at will, growing enormous or tiny, which in more than one story proves her undoing. She lives for centuries and does not visibly age.

Three tales fixed her in popular memory. In «The Ox-Driver and the Yamauba» she pursues a drover as far as her own hut and dies there, boiled. In «The Three Paper Talismans» a temple boy flees her by throwing charms that turn into a river and a mountain, and the priest finishes her by tricking her into making herself small. In «The Sun's Golden Chain» two children escape by a chain let down from the sky and she falls upon a field of buckwheat, whose red stalks have explained her blood ever since. The image is fixed by Toriyama Sekien, who drew her in the Gazu Hyakki Yagyō of 1776 with her hair loose and her eyes lowered. And the nō titled Yamanba, attributed to Zeami, raises her to something else: there a dancer who has made her fortune impersonating her meets the real one, who is no roadside monster but an old woman circling the mountains of the world without rest. This is the philosophical yamauba, and she coexists with the one of the tales without cancelling her.

The benevolent yamauba who raises the child hero on Mount Ashigara is the better-known half of the figure, and also the more recent. She does not come from ancient tales: she is born in the theatre. In the seventh month of 1712, at the Takemoto-za in Osaka, Chikamatsu Monzaemon premiered the jōruri Komochi Yamanba, which crosses the nō Yamanba with the world of Minamoto no Yorimitsu and his four captains. There the courtesan Yaegiri ends up turned into a yamanba and gives birth to the boy called Kaidōmaru, who will be the warrior Sakata no Kintoki; the popular name Kintarō spreads from the middle of the Edo period onward. Around 1800, Kitagawa Utamaro devoted more than thirty prints to the pair, and with them completed the reversal of her image: the white-maned old woman with the split mouth came to be shown as a young and beautiful woman combing her son's hair or blackening her teeth. This half should be dated, not deleted. The devourer of the tales and the mother of the stage are the same figure read two hundred years apart.