Ubume

The oldest telling sits in the Konjaku Monogatari-shū, the anthology compiled in the twelfth century: in book 27 the men of Minamoto no Yorimitsu dare one another to cross a ford by night, and the lot falls to Taira no Suetake, one of his four captains. Midstream a woman is waiting, and she holds out a crying infant. Suetake takes it, carries it across and, when she asks for it back, refuses; what he has in his arms turns out to be a handful of leaves. Two Edo works later settle the reading: Yamaoka Genrin's Hyaku Monogatari Hyōban (1686) describes her stained with blood from the waist down and crying something that sounds like «obareyo», while the Kii Zōdanshū (1687) explains that a woman who dies before delivering returns in this shape, and adds that taking the child brings a blessing rather than a curse. The ubume is neither punishment nor revenge: it is a birth left unfinished.

The image everyone reproduces is Toriyama Sekien's in the Gazu Hyakki Yagyō (1776): a woman by the water, bare above the waist and wrapped below in a bloodstained cloth, the child in her arms. The plate, however, is not labelled «ubume» but with the characters of the Chinese guhuoniao, a bird that steals children: signs from another tradition read with the Japanese name, which is why the ubume is also called kokakuchō. The identification was older than the plate. Terashima Ryōan's Wakan Sansai Zue (1712) already took it for granted and placed the creature along the coasts of Kyūshū, where she appeared on rainy nights in the shape of a gull with a phosphorescent glow. The two layers are worth prising apart, because they sound like one: the mother at the ford is Japanese and earlier, and the bird arrived with the Chinese encyclopaedic tradition.

Whoever accepts the bundle finds it heavier at every step, heavier at last than a boulder, and what he is carrying turns out to be a stone, a stone image of Jizō or a handful of leaves. Whoever holds on to the end is left with a strength that was not his: in one account the man discovers it the next morning, when the cloth tears in his hands as he wrings it, and with that strength he ends up a wrestler. Behind the tale lies a real practice, the mi-futatsu, «two bodies»: opening the belly of a dead pregnant woman to bury the child separately, done across wide areas of Japan into the nineteenth century and, in the countryside, into the early twentieth. The names change from district to district. In Fukushima she is obo, and there the child bites at the throat, so a piece of cloth is worn as a defence. In Saga and Kumamoto she is ugume, and what was carried by night is stone or straw by dawn. In Nagasaki she is unme, and the strength she hands out runs down the female line.