Azukibabaa

The sound reaches the road before anything else does. Zaku, zaku, zaku. Somebody is rinsing red beans in a colander down by the water, the small hard rattle of them turning over one another, a noise so ordinary that a farmer walking the Tone valley home at dusk would place it without breaking stride. Then the voice comes up underneath it, cracked and in no hurry at all, and it is asking a question. Shall I grind the azuki, or shall I catch a person and eat one. Zaku, zaku, zaku.

That was what an old woman named Iizuka Taki told a folklorist in the mountains of Gunma in 1956, describing what waited in the gullies of her village at nightfall. The name for it, across a band of country running from Miyagi down through the Kanto plain, is Azukibabaa. The bean hag. In some districts she is the azuki-togi-babaa instead, the hag who grinds rather than washes, and the difference in the verb turns out not to matter much to anyone who meets her.

Japan has a whole small family of bean-noise spirits, and most of them are harmless. The azukiarai is the famous one, a shy thing that rinses beans in a stream and runs off if you get close, more nuisance than danger. Azukibabaa is what happens when that same noise is told by people who mean it as a warning. She keeps the sound and drops the shyness. A note filed with the Japanese folklore society in 1936, from the southern Musashi country, says it plainly: at night, by a brook or in any dim place, the azuki-baa came out, washed her beans, bewitched people, and caught and ate them. Nothing about her is coy.

The accounts cluster around thresholds. In Kawagoe in Saitama, the noise was heard on rainy evenings at a derelict temple in Shimo-Kosaka, and mothers told disobedient children that the bean-grinding old woman would come for them. Near Takasaki Castle in Gunma she worked a stream and swallowed the people who came down to it. Under a bridge at Kurobashi, between two hamlets, she asked her question of everyone crossing. In Kawawa, on the edge of what is now Yokohama, she was simply the hag who polished azuki, and she was for frightening children. Bridges, temple gates, the mouths of gullies, the last hour of daylight. She lives on the seams.

Her appearance is a harder thing to pin down, because most of the people who reported her never claimed to have seen anything. The sound is nearly the whole of her. One Tokyo telling is the exception and it is worth having: under an autumn moon, a thin voice comes from a brook counting beans, one, two, and at first light an old woman in white clothing with a strainer in her hands walks into the mist and does not come out of it. That is as much body as the record gives her, and it may be more than she deserves, because the tellers themselves usually knew perfectly well who was doing it. In Shōwa village they said it was a mujina or a weasel. In Niigata they said the weasel made the noise with its tail. In Akita they blamed a large toad shifting its weight in the shallows. On Shikoku they blamed a bean-loving tanuki. The hag is a costume that several different animals are accused of wearing.

Not every version stays at the waterline. In the Kita-Koma district of Yamanashi she sat in a big tree beside a Suwa shrine and called down to people on the night road, offering them beans, and if the offer startled them she reached out with an enormous sieve and scooped them up into the branches. The yokai researcher Murakami Kenji noticed that this is not really bean behaviour at all. It is the behaviour of the tsurube-otoshi, the thing that drops out of trees onto travellers, and somewhere in the hills these two stories leaned into one another and swapped a costume.

The strangest place she ever settled was a temple in Tochigi. At Ryūkō-in, in what is now the city of Sano, a wooden figure a little over a metre tall stood for the better part of three centuries in a hall south of the gate, and the parish took it for Kateki, the legendary Chinese inventor of the boat. Somebody shot it at some point and left a hole in its belly. Local children played with it. Local parents told them that the azuki-togi-baba came out of it after dark, went wandering through the fields singing her ugly song, and carried off badly behaved children, and there is still a song in the district that goes with the story. Then in the 1920s a local historian looked properly at the scroll in the figure’s right hand, where the letters ERASMVS and ROTTERDAM and the year 1598 are still legible under the damage. The statue was the stern ornament of the Dutch ship De Liefde, wrecked on the Bungo coast in 1600 with William Adams aboard. It was made a National Treasure in 1930 and is an Important Cultural Property today, on deposit at the Tokyo National Museum. For three hundred years, the good people of Sano had been frightening their children with Desiderius Erasmus.

What she can do is narrow and effective. She throws a familiar domestic sound out of a place where no kitchen exists, and she asks a question that has no safe silence in it. She works weather and season, favouring rain, mist and autumn nights, and she has that sieve, which turns a road into a ceiling. What she cannot do is fetch you. Every account leaves the decisive step with the listener: you have to stop, you have to turn toward the water, you have to try to see. The people of Kurobashi understood this better than most. When they crossed the bridge at dusk and the voice put its two options to them, they simply answered it out loud, told her to go ahead and grind her beans, and walked on. She was bound to her ground and her hour, and she was, when the villagers were being honest about it, a weasel.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Azukibabaa?

Azukibabaa is a Japanese yokai told of from Miyagi Prefecture down through the Kanto region, an old woman who makes the sound of azuki beans being washed or ground at the edge of water after dark. She is the dangerous version of the harmless azukiarai, and she is said to catch and eat people who come to investigate the noise.

What does Azukibabaa say?

Her line, recorded in Gunma and in slightly different wording elsewhere, is a question: shall I grind the azuki beans, or shall I catch a person and eat one. It is usually followed by the rasping zaku, zaku, zaku of the beans themselves. In some districts the question was treated as something you could answer, and people crossing the Kurobashi bridge would call back that she should grind her beans.

Where does Azukibabaa appear?

She appears at boundaries and at dusk: streams, swamps, the undersides of bridges, derelict temples and dark gullies. Specific places attached to her include a stream near Takasaki Castle in Gunma, an abandoned temple at Shimo-Kosaka in Kawagoe, and a large tree beside a Suwa shrine in the Kita-Koma district of Yamanashi. Rainy evenings, misty autumn nights and the hour after sunset are when she is expected.

What does Azukibabaa look like?

Most accounts describe no appearance at all, because she is heard rather than seen. The fullest description comes from a Tokyo telling in which an old woman in white clothing, carrying a strainer, is glimpsed at a brook at dawn before she disappears into the mist. In the Yamanashi version she also carries an oversized sieve, which she uses to scoop people up into a tree.

What is the connection between Azukibabaa and the Erasmus statue in Sano?

A wooden statue kept at Ryūkō-in temple in Sano, Tochigi, was venerated for centuries as Kateki, the legendary Chinese inventor of the boat, and local people said the azuki-togi-baba emerged from it at night to carry off badly behaved children. In the 1920s the figure was identified as a carving of Desiderius Erasmus, the stern ornament of the Dutch ship De Liefde that wrecked off Kyushu in 1600. It was designated a National Treasure in 1930 and is now an Important Cultural Property held on deposit at the Tokyo National Museum.

Related Entries

Azukiarai/Azukitogi, Mujina, Kamaitachi, Tanuki, Kitsune, Tsurube-otoshi, Amazake-babaa, Yama-uba, Sunakake-baba, Betobeto-san, Kijo, Namahage, Yōkai, Baba Yaga