Ubume

A traveler on a country road after dark hears the child before he sees the mother. It is a thin, worn-out crying, the sound of an infant who has been crying far too long, and it comes from somewhere in the rain ahead. Then the woman steps into view. Her robe hangs heavy with water and clings to her legs, and low across the front of it a dark stain has spread that he does her the courtesy of not examining. She is holding a bundle against her chest. She asks him, with great politeness, whether he might hold her baby for just a moment. The instant the weight passes into his arms, she is gone.

This is the ubume, and she has walked Japanese roads since at least the twelfth century. She is the ghost of a woman who died in childbirth, or while still carrying, or in the raw days just after. In the Buddhist reckoning that shaped her legend, such a death carried a particular horror: women who died pregnant were thought to sink into Chi no Ike, the Lake of Blood, a hell reserved for the pollution of birth and its bleeding. But it is not punishment that holds the ubume here. It is the child. Her worry for it was so total at the moment of death that it would not let her cross over, and so she stays, soaked and grieving, on the near side of things.

She does not look the same in every telling. Sometimes she is an ordinary young mother, unremarkable until you notice that her feet make no proper sound and that she is too pale for a living person on a cold night. Sometimes she is visibly pregnant still. In the worst accounts she is a corpse from the waist down, blood-darkened, carrying an underdeveloped infant that was never meant to breathe. The stories agree on the rain. She comes on wet, black nights, when sound carries strangely and a crying baby could be anything, and she comes wanting help that no living person can really give.

If her child survived her, the ubume’s nights have a routine. She goes into the village. She slips into a shop while the shutters are still half open and asks for sweets, for soft candy, for the small bright things a small child wants, and she sets down payment and leaves before the shopkeeper looks closely. In the morning the coins in the till have become a handful of dead leaves, brown and curled and still faintly damp. She rarely buys rice. She rarely buys anything sensible. She buys what would make the baby happy, which tells you something about what kind of ghost she is.

The encounter everyone remembers is the one on the road. She holds out the bundle, asks the stranger to take it, and vanishes the moment he does. At first the baby is only a baby. Then it begins to grow heavy. It keeps growing heavy, past the weight of any infant, past the weight a man can hold, until his arms shake and his knees give under it, and when he finally looks down he is not holding a child at all. He is holding a stone. Often it is a roadside boulder. Often it is a carved image of Jizo, the gentle bodhisattva who watches over dead children, the legend folding back on its own grief in a way it never quite explains.

There is a softer cousin to her, the kosodate yurei, the child-raising ghost, who is the same woman seen from a kinder angle: a mother who died but whose baby lived, returning night after night to feed it with candy bought in coins that turn to leaves. The two are so close that the names slide into each other. She is not trying to hurt anyone. She simply died with the wrong thing left unfinished, and a love that strong does not know how to stop. Part of her older shape has been traced to China, to the kokakucho, a night bird that preyed on children, and the scholar-artist Toriyama Sekien set the name down in his eighteenth-century catalogues of spirits, fixing in ink a figure who had already haunted the countryside for six hundred years.

Her power is mostly the power of need. She can press a bundle into unwilling arms and make it impossible to refuse; she can make stone weigh like guilt; she can pass dead leaves as money for one night before the spell wears thin. None of it is cruelty. All of it comes straight out of what she was and how she died.

Her limits come from the same place. The ubume cannot actually save her child. She cannot feed it properly, cannot hold it, cannot finish the one task that keeps her here. She is bound to the place she died and to the hour and the weather that suit her. What ends her is not a weapon. It is care taken up by the living: the surviving baby found and raised, a memorial rite performed, the small body given a proper burial. When the thing she could not finish is finished for her, the crying on the road stops, and the woman in the wet robe is finally allowed to be only dead.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an ubume?

An ubume is a Japanese yokai, the ghost of a woman who died during or shortly after childbirth. Her worry for her child is so intense that her spirit cannot pass on, leaving her to wander as a sorrowful, often blood-stained apparition. The ubume typically appears on dark, rainy nights near the place where she died.

How does a woman become an ubume?

A woman becomes an ubume when she dies while pregnant, during labor, or in the days just after giving birth, and her attachment to her child prevents her spirit from moving on. In the Buddhist belief connected to the legend, women who died pregnant were thought to be consigned to Chi no Ike, the Lake of Blood. It is the mother’s unfinished love, rather than the punishment itself, that keeps the ubume bound to the living world.

What happens if you take an ubume’s baby?

If an ubume hands over her swaddled child and a person accepts it, the bundle grows steadily heavier until it is impossible to hold. When the person finally looks closely, the “baby” is revealed to be a stone, often a roadside boulder or a carved image of the bodhisattva Jizo. The ubume herself vanishes the moment the bundle leaves her arms.

What is the difference between an ubume and a kosodate yurei?

An ubume and a kosodate yurei are closely related Japanese ghosts, and the names are sometimes used interchangeably. The main difference is behavior: a kosodate yurei is a mother whose baby survived and who returns to buy food and sweets for it, while an ubume also tries to pass her child into a stranger’s arms. Both are spirits of mothers bound by love for a child they left behind.

How can an ubume be put to rest?

An ubume is freed not by force but by care given to her child. When her surviving baby is found and raised, a memorial rite is performed, or a dead infant is given a proper burial, the spirit’s unfinished task is completed for her. Once that happens, the ubume is able to leave the world and the haunting ends.

Related Entries

Yūrei, Onryō, Funayūrei, Oiwa, Okiku, Kuchisake-onna, Nure-onna, Yuki-onna, Kokakuchō, Konaki-jiji, Kṣitigarbha, Datsue-ba, Ghost