Yamauba

Summary

The yamauba is the mountain woman of the Japanese tales: a tall old woman with long hair, skin so white it is nearly transparent, piercing eyes and a mouth split to her ears, who eats children, and whoever meets her in the mountains falls ill. In other tales she gives wealth, nurses children and raises heroes. She is also called mountain woman, mountain princess, mountain mother and the oni hag.

In the tales "The wife who does not eat", "The ox-driver and the yamauba" and "The three charms" she is a man-eater who chases the lad or the ox-driver through the mountains at night. In "The old woman's skin" and "Nukafuku and Komefuku" she helps the wronged heroine and gives her a magic treasure. In local tales she comes down to the year-end market, or is seen weaving in the mountains, and she has a ball of hemp thread that never runs out however much is taken from it. On the island of Iki the twentieth day of the twelfth month is the yamauba's washing day, when people do not use water, and it is also called the washing day of the mountain kami.

It is told that she gives birth in the mountains to six or twelve children on a rock and nurses them; that on Mount Hakone she raised the child Kintarō, who became Sakata no Kintoki, one of the four followers of Minamoto no Raikō who killed the oni Shuten-dōji; and that she helped at the birth of Emperor Ōjin in the mountains, who became Hachiman. The playwright Chikamatsu, in a play of 1712, made her a courtesan named Yaegiri who became a yamauba, her son being Kintoki.

Her fullest picture is the Noh play Yamamba, attributed to Zeami, who performed it before the shogun as his Sarugaku dangi of 1430 records. In the capital there was a singing girl called Hyakuma Yamamba, famous for a dance telling the yamauba's rounds through the mountains. She set out with men to guard her on a pilgrimage to the Zenkōji temple, and when they reached Mount Agero, between the provinces of Echigo and Etchū, the day suddenly went dark. A woman of the mountain appeared and offered them lodging, then said she was the true yamauba, that she had darkened the day to hear the song sung about her, and promised to appear in her true form if the song was sung at moonrise; then she vanished. At night she appeared in a fearsome form, described the deep mountains and valleys, and said that wrong and right are one and good and evil are not two, that she helps people in their work without their seeing her, and that the dust of attachment to the world piled up into clouds and became a yamauba. Then she danced, showed them her rounds through the mountains, ran over the peaks and down the valleys, and vanished.

The idea her stories turn on is that the mountain itself is a fearsome mother. The mountain eats whoever is lost in it and nurses whoever shelters in it: the yamauba eats children and raises Kintarō, chases the ox-driver and gives the wronged girl her treasure. Japanese folklorists say her picture came from the villagers' fear of the people of the mountains, and from women who served the mountain kami, who for many Japanese is female. The Noh stage makes her the whole mountain, turning with the seasons, not knowing herself whether she is evil or good. She is the sacred mountain in a woman's form.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since the project's essays do not read the yamauba. The name 山姥 is two words: yama, mountain, and uba, old woman, in the older language also a wet-nurse. The mountain in Arabic is al-ayham: the Lisān al-ʿArab says that al-ayham is a lofty mountain, the hard, tall mountain that is not climbed, and that al-yahmāʾ is the desert in which no way is found. The h falls between y and m, as this encyclopedia reads Yomi, the land of the dead, from the same root. The old woman in Arabic is umm, mother: Lane says that umm is the mother of a human being or of any animal, and that a woman says of her aunt: she was to me like a mother. The m becomes b, the two lip sounds interchanging in the Juthoor tables. Yamauba is then the mother of the lofty mountain, which is one of her names in Japanese itself, yamahaha, mountain mother.

Linguistic Root

The Old Japanese lexicon records yama, mountain, and omo and amo, mother, but not uba, and the earliest use of the word yamauba the great Japanese dictionary records is from the fifteenth century, in the Noh play and in Zeami's book.

In the Lisān al-ʿArab and the other dictionaries every sense of ayham is a force that cannot be turned back: the ayhamān are the torrent and the fire, or the torrent and the raging camel, so called because they cannot be warded off; the ayham is the brave man whom nothing turns back; and the ayham among mountains is the lofty one that is not climbed. The mountain the yamauba lives on is a mountain no one climbs, and she in it is like torrent and fire that cannot be turned away.

The Old Japanese word for mother, omo, has m, keeping the m of Arabic umm, and the later uba changes the m to b. Lane gathers in umm motherhood in humans and animals and the one who stands in a mother's place, as an aunt who raises a child. This is what the yamauba does when she raises Kintarō.

The limit of the reading is that uba does not occur in the eighth-century texts, that the reading of yama needs the h to fall, and that yama is an everyday Japanese word with no Semitic witness for a mountain in y and m alone.

Key Mythic Narratives

The yamauba at the fair

The chronicle Tōdaiki records that in 1609 people in Kyoto crowded to see a yamauba on show near the Tōfukuji temple, with white hair and red rims to her eyes, swallowing everything she was given in one mouthful; when people asked about her, she turned out to be a madwoman with white skin. In the late short tale Princess Hanayo, the yamauba is described with a face like a tray, sunken eyes, a wide mouth, fangs reaching her nose, a nose like a bird's beak, and red hair on her head between lumps like horns.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Teryel in the Amazigh tales is a wild old woman of the wilderness who eats children; she has two huge breasts that she throws over her shoulders, and a child who seizes one and suckles becomes her ally, so that she helps it instead of eating it. The yamauba is like her: she eats children and nurses them, and raises a hero in the mountains. In both, the wild woman eats and nurses, and suckling turns her from enemy to mother. Diodorus of Sicily says that Lamia, the Greek child-eater, was born in a cave in Libya, as the Teryel page tells.

The Queen Mother of the West in the Chinese Classic of Mountains and Seas is a woman who lives on Jade Mountain with a leopard's tail and a tiger's teeth, her hair tangled, roaring, governing the calamities of heaven; later books make her a gracious queen who keeps the drug of immortality. The yamauba too is a mountain woman with fearsome teeth who brings both disaster and gifts, and whose face changes from book to book.