Nando-baba

Also Known As: 納戸婆, “storeroom hag”; also read Nando-babaa, and recorded as Nando-basa 納戸ばあさ, Nando-bajo 納戸ばじょ and Nando-babaa 納戸ババア
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: She lives inside the closed back room of an occupied house and bolts from it when anyone opens the room to clean.
Role in Mythos: She is the resident of the darkest room in the home, understood in western Japan as a household deity who lost her offerings and kept her address.
Relation to Humans: Households shared their houses with her without much ceremony, and dealt with her when she appeared by beating her out with the yard broom. In eastern Kagawa the relationship was worse, since there she was said to take newborn children, though this is widely read as a crossover with the mountain hag.

The broom comes first in most of the tellings. Somebody in the household decides the back room is overdue for sweeping, hauls the door along its worn track, and lets daylight into a space that has not had any in months. The air in there is cool against the arms and smells of rice dust and old cloth. Something in the corner objects.

What comes out, in the villages of Akaiwa district and in Jōtō district east of Okayama city, is a bald old woman, moving fast and making a noise the collectors wrote down as a single syllable: hōh. She does not fight. The householder swings the stiff yard broom at her, connects, and she goes straight down and under the veranda boards, into the crawlspace where the cold gets in, and the business of cleaning resumes. This is the entire encounter. It reads less like a haunting than like evicting a cat.

She is small. That is nearly the whole of her physical record. In the storerooms of old Okayama houses she was said to be sitting there already, a little old woman in the dark, and some held that she was not an old woman at all but a mamedanuki, the smallest kind of tanuki, doing a shape it liked. Beyond baldness and smallness the sources go quiet. Nobody wrote down what she wore or what her face did, which is its own kind of information: she was never really looked at, only startled and driven off.

Her range runs across the western half of the country. Nara, Hyōgo, Kagawa, Okayama and Miyazaki all kept a version, under names that shift with the dialect, so that the same being is nando-basa in one district and nando-bajo in the next. In eastern Kagawa the story turns much darker, and she is said to carry off babies newly born. There is a plain reading of that, which is that the mountain hag of the uplands bled into the storeroom hag of the house and gave her an appetite she did not originally have. There is also a less comfortable reading, because the room she is supposed to live in is the room where the births happened.

That room is the key to her. The nando was the innermost part of a Japanese house, called heya or oku or nema depending on where you stood, and it held the rice bin, the stored clothing, the bedding, the married couple’s sleeping place and the birthing place. It was the most closed and darkest space under the roof, the one part of the building no visitor entered. It was also a woman’s room in a specific institutional sense: the key to the nando, along with the rice paddle, was the token of the housewife’s authority, and passing it on was how that authority changed hands.

Gods lived there. Across old Shisō in Hyōgo, Tōhaku in Tottori, the old Maniwa, Kume, Tomata and Katsuta districts of Okayama, the Oki islands and the Gotō islands off Nagasaki, families kept a nandogami, a storeroom deity, in that back room. On ordinary days nothing was done for it. At New Year, at the March seedbed, at the May planting, at the autumn harvest rites and at the tenth-month Inoko, the housewife set up sakaki branches and put out sake, rice and rice cakes. Through the Chūgoku region that deity was usually called Toshitokosan and counted as the god of the incoming year, and its New Year decoration was made larger and finer than the one at the front of the house. On Oki and on Ukujima it was the god of the rice fields, moving out to the paddies in spring and back to the storeroom in autumn. It was called a female god, a crop god, a god of children, a god of safe delivery. It did not mind the pollution of childbirth. It did mind things running short. And it was described, in the same breath as all that fertility, as bashful, and fond of dark places.

Set that beside a small shy old woman who lives in the back room and flees from daylight, and the resemblance does the work by itself. The common explanation in western Japan is exactly that: the storeroom hag is the storeroom god, still in residence after the offerings stopped, demoted from something you fed to something you swept at. The folklorist Iijima Yoshiharu grouped her with the zashiki-warashi on the same grounds, both of them the shape a house deity takes once it has slipped out of the calendar and into the category of things that startle you.

Most of what survives of her comes through one remarkable little book. In 1935 Satō Kiyoaki, a botanist from Satoshō, published the *Genkō Zenkoku Yōkai Jiten*, the first yōkai dictionary compiled in Japan, through the Chūgoku Folklore Society run by Katsura Matasaburō. It gathers three hundred and sixty beings from thirty-four prefectures, and roughly a fifth of them are from Okayama alone, because that is where its author lived and collected. Nando-baba appears in it twice, under two different spellings of her name. Yanagita Kunio drew on Satō’s dictionary when he assembled his own register of yōkai names. In his preface Satō explained that every entry was drawn from index cards he had filled in himself, and that the numbers printed beside the names would lead back to fuller records. Those cards have never been found.

Her powers amount to occupancy and surprise. She holds a room that the family needs and cannot see into, she chooses her moment, and the noise she makes is enough to send an adult backwards out of a doorway. In Kagawa that occupancy extends to taking what is most valuable in the room. Set against this, her weaknesses are almost comic in their ordinariness: she cannot tolerate being seen, she has no answer to a broom, and she retreats not out of the house but under its floor, which means she was never trying to leave. She loses every encounter. A being whose defining act is to be driven downward into the crawlspace by a woman with cleaning to do is not a predator, and the Kagawa baby-stealing sits awkwardly against the rest of the record for precisely that reason. There is one parallel worth noting further east, in the Tsukui district of what is now Sagamihara, where a frightening old woman called tana-baba was said to live in the tiered shelving used for raising silkworms. Same idea, different furniture.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Nando-baba?

The Nando-baba is a Japanese yōkai in the form of a small bald old woman who lives inside the nando, the dark inner storeroom of a house. She is found in the folklore of western Japan, particularly Okayama, and is best known for bursting out of the storeroom when the family tries to clean it. Many accounts hold that she was originally a household deity rather than a monster.

Where does the Nando-baba live?

She lives in the nando, the innermost room of a traditional Japanese house, which served as storage for rice and clothing and also as the couple’s sleeping room and the birthing room. Tellings are recorded from Nara, Hyōgo, Kagawa, Okayama and Miyazaki. When driven out of the storeroom she does not leave the property but hides in the crawlspace under the veranda.

How do you get rid of a Nando-baba?

You hit her with the yard broom. In the accounts from Akaiwa and Jōtō districts in Okayama, the householder drives the Nando-baba out with a garden broom and she flees under the floorboards. She does not retaliate, and simply opening the storeroom to daylight is often enough to make her run.

Was the Nando-baba originally a god?

Western Japanese households commonly enshrined a nandogami, a storeroom deity, in the same back room, and the Nando-baba is widely understood as that deity after its worship lapsed. The nandogami was tended by the housewife at New Year and at the farming festivals, and was described as a shy god fond of dark places. The folklorist Iijima Yoshiharu placed the Nando-baba alongside the zashiki-warashi as beings connected to this household cult.

Does the Nando-baba steal babies?

In eastern Kagawa she was said to carry off newborn infants, but this claim appears only there and is generally explained as confusion with the yamauba, the mountain hag. Everywhere else the Nando-baba does nothing worse than frighten whoever opens the storeroom door. The oldest surviving written source for her, Satō Kiyoaki’s 1935 yōkai dictionary, records her as a storeroom being rather than a child-taker.