Japan’s wonderfully chaotic world of demons and supernatural spirits has inspired much interest of late. Noriko Reider takes the lead in untangling this rich tapestry of folklore and legend for an English-language readership with monographs on the supernatural and demon lore (2002, 2010) and articles on a range of mythic creatures. With Mountain Witches: Yamauba, she turns her attention to the cryptic and complex image of Japan’s most fearsome female ogre, offering a study that is as compelling as it is comprehensive.
The mountain witch, as Reider explains, goes by many names: yamamba, yamanba, or yamauba, all pointing to the same set of graphs for “mountain” (yama) and “old woman” (uba). Whereas the characteristics of the yamauba are complex and often conflicting, the presence of the mountains and the creature’s femaleness are constants. Mountains, Reider notes, are sacred in Japan and are often the sites for religious pilgrimages, temples, graveyards, and all the uncanny associations these enjoy. Representing the uncharted and unbounded, mountains stand in sharp contrast to the safe security of the village (or sato) with its orderliness and rules. Women of the village are generally considered well behaved and meek, whereas women of the mountain are another matter altogether. The yamauba, Reider expounds, “is an anthropophagous woman living in the mountains, she possesses the duality of good and evil, and she has the transformational power to manifest herself as an ugly crone or a young beauty. Invisible yamauba also exist. Some yamauba are mothers of divine children. Lesser-known attributes of yamauba include flying and bloodsucking” (19-20). Some yamauba read minds and tell the future, others are associated with spiders and spinning. Whether associated with the malevolent behavior of cannibalism or the benevolent act of birthing, the yamauba is anything but ordinary. She represents that which exceeds the borders of propriety and threatens the stability of the status quo.
“Mountain witch” is the standard translation for yamauba. There are certainly comparisons between the Japanese ogress and the Euro-American witch. Both were birthed by a medieval zeitgeist that feared the mystery of the female body and the presumed power of women to tamper with and threaten a family structure that depended on fertility. (Witches were believed to steal babies for Satan; yamauba, to eat them.) But, as Reider points out, yamauba were almost always solitary figures who preferred to isolate from the trappings of the human community. They did not consort with a devil figure or cavort in covens. Rather, they were terrifying in their singularity.
Mountain Witches: Yamauba presents the many competing images of this fascinating female figure in careful detail. Organized into six chapters—each neatly divided into digestible smaller sections—this study charts the derivation of the yamauba’s name, the religious underpinnings for her character, the different ways she has appeared in folktales, films, and modern short stories, even in late twentieth-century fashion, and the feminist interpretations of her place in social history.
Chapter 1 tackles the conundrum of the yamauba as both a man-eater and a gentle helper. Important to this duality is the yamauba’s initial appearance in myths and legends as an oni or demon whose betrayal and shaming by those who made her the object of scrutiny, rendered her angry and vengeful. Her later emergence as the old woman in the mountains established a more benign aspect, but her helpful nature never completely supplanted her fearsome visage.
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 continue exploring the yamauba’s numerous features, examining how they change over time, reflecting the shifting contexts that produced and sustained them. We learn about the yamauba’s mothering, her mind-reading and fortune-telling, her ability to fly, and her connection with the realm of the dead. Each new discussion of the yamauba introduces different aspects of her character while reinforcing her paradoxical position as a magnificent force of nature, encompassing good and evil, demon and god, and a fearsome female fecundity.
Especially timely given Japan’s rapidly aging population, chapter 5 takes up the yamauba’s alignment with notions of agedness and dementia. The yamauba’s anti-social behavior suggests aspects of dementia not uncommon in those who are long lived. Analyzing legends of the “abandoned granny” or obasute, Reider associates the fear of the aged woman with an agrarian impulse to ostracize nonproductive village members who demonstrate signs of dementia. Reider suggests that whereas it is unlikely that old women were actually discarded on mountainsides, it is likely that family members may have entertained the notion of ditching unruly elders. She suggests that folk accounts of disagreeable, despised old women may have captured the tension in family dynamics at the time, where mother-in-laws were frequently characterized as meddlesome and demanding. Perhaps it is not difficult to see how a carping mother-in-law might manifest as an ogre with a voracious appetite.
Reider’s liveliest chapter is her last, “Yamauba Mumbo Jumbo: Yamauba in Contemporary Society.” Here she presents the various ways the yamauba figure still inspires the creative works and daily lives of the Japanese. Drawing on Michael Dylan Foster’s notion of “folkloresque” or the way popular culture perceives and replicates aspects of folklore in film, video games, and other such products, Reider coins the term “yamaubaesque” to carry much the same value. She sees this in the street fashions enjoyed by “yamanba-gyaru” (young women in shocking make-up and attire who congregated primarily in Tokyo’s Shibuya area) as well as in characters in anime films, short stories, and poems. She finds in these creative works a fertile appropriation of the yamauba character: her mystery, her othering, her power. But this yamauba play signals the fact that whereas the yamauba may still exert power over the creative imagination, she is necessarily fragmented. Characters are forever “[l]ike a yamauba, yet not one” (146).
Erudite, cross-disciplinary, and accessible, Mountain Witches: Yamauba contributes new insights and superb scholarship to studies of Japanese folklore and myth. Certainly, Reider’s study will intrigue readers interested in Japanese literature, feminist studies, and female monsters.
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[Review length: 984 words • Review posted on April 1, 2022]