Yama-uba

Also Known As: 山姥, “mountain crone”; also yamauba, yamanba, yamamba; yamahaha, “mountain mother”, in Shikoku and southern Kyushu; onibaba, “demon hag”, in the harsher tellings
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: She combines disguise, sorcery and prodigious strength with an appetite for human flesh that no meal ever closes.
Role in Mythos: She is the danger that lives on the mountain passes between villages, offering shelter to travellers and then feeding on them, though a substantial minority of tales have her handing out treasure instead.
Relation to Humans: She meets people as a hospitable old woman and turns on them once they are asleep, which is why her victims in folklore are almost always the ox-drivers, pedlars and pilgrims who actually walked the mountain roads. Where she is treated well she can reverse entirely, giving wealth, magical garments or foster-care to the kind and curses to the rude.

Rain comes early to the passes above Sakaigawa, and the light leaves the cedars a full hour before it should. An ox-driver hauling salted mackerel toward the next village hears a voice behind him on the trail, a woman’s voice, perfectly ordinary, asking what is in his baskets. He hands a fish back over his shoulder without turning around. She eats it and asks for another. By the time the baskets are empty she is still asking, the ox is walking very fast, and the man has begun to understand what is following him.

That is the shape of a yama-uba story: courtesy, then arithmetic, then panic. She is the old woman of the Japanese mountains, called yamauba or yamanba or yamamba depending on the province, yamahaha in the south, onibaba when the teller wants no ambiguity at all. Her territory is the high ground between settlements, the cedar dark where the trail narrows and the temperature drops. The people she meets in the tales are precisely the people who used those roads: ox-drivers, horse-drivers, coopers, pedlars carrying needles and thread. They were also the ones telling the tales, which explains a good deal about who gets eaten in them.

She looks, at first, like somebody’s grandmother. That is the whole point of her. The standard description gives her long unkempt hair gone golden-white, a kimono filthy and worn to rags, a face thinned by weather and years, and no other warning whatsoever. Some tellings add horns or a mouth of proper teeth. One persistent tradition hides a second mouth on the crown of her head, buried under the hair, feeding steadily while the polite mouth below it goes on being polite. In Nagano she has a single eye. On Hachijō-jima she carries sores on her body and slings her breasts over her shoulders with a cord, the way a working woman ties back her sleeves.

Where she came from depends on who is answering. The word surfaces in written Japanese in the Muromachi period, when merchants and pilgrims were pushing further into the ranges and encountering, in numbers, the solitary women already living there. One line of thinking traces her back further still, to the yama no kami, the mountain deity, generally reckoned female, who lost her altars over the centuries and kept her hunger. Folk explanation is blunter. Women accused of crimes fled into the wilderness and hardened there over years. Families in famine years walked their mothers up into the trees and came back down alone. The mountains were where you sent the people you could not feed. A monster who lives up there and eats travellers is not a difficult story to arrive at.

The ox-driver’s road ends badly in most versions. He gives up the fish, then the baskets, then the ox, and when there is nothing left he runs, and she runs after him, and he finds a house standing by itself in the dark and climbs into its rafters. It is her house. She comes in, banks the fire, sets a pot of rice to boil and falls asleep in the warmth, and he comes down and puts her into the pot, or drips scalding water on her through the ceiling, depending on the province. The tale is Ushikata to yamauba. It was told to children.

Not every meeting goes that way, which is what makes her interesting rather than merely frightening. In Nukafuku Komefuku, two sisters climb the mountain for fruit and find her waiting; the kind one, tormented at home by a stepmother, comes back with treasure, and the ill-mannered one comes back cursed. The Ubakawa tale has her hand over a magical hide that brings its wearer good fortune. In Kōchi they said a household a yama-uba took an interest in would grow wealthy fast, and some families deified her outright as a protective god. One Shizuoka village remembered her as a gentle woman in clothes made of bark who borrowed a cauldron, boiled her two gō of rice in it, and made the floorboards creak when she sat down beside the fire. She spins. She minds hearths. She nurses children, and in Lafcadio Hearn’s account of a festival ghost-show she appears as the Mountain Nurse, who takes small children and feeds them for a while before she eats them.

The most famous child she raises survives her. In the Edo period, popular puppet drama attached her to Kintarō, the red-skinned boy of superhuman strength who wrestles bears on Mount Ashigara and grows up into Sakata no Kintoki, one of Minamoto no Yorimitsu’s four braves. Some versions make her his rescuer, others make her his own mother, gone gaunt and wild in mountain exile. Utamaro built something like fifty prints out of the pairing around the turn of the nineteenth century, and they are startlingly tender: the mountain crone combing the boy’s hair, tying his topknot, letting him nurse. The monster with a child at her breast.

The Noh stage reached her first and went furthest. In Yamanba, performed since the fifteenth century and long associated with Zeami, a Kyoto dancer nicknamed Hyakuma Yamanba for her celebrated song about the mountain crone sets out on pilgrimage to Zenkō-ji. Crossing Mount Agero, the sun drops out of the sky hours ahead of schedule. A woman past middle age appears, offers lodging, asks the dancer to perform the very piece that made her famous, and then admits she pulled the sun down herself to arrange the request. At moonrise she returns in her true and anomalous form and dances her own endless circuit of the peaks, snow laid down in winter, blossom in spring, while the chorus works through the proposition that defilement and enlightenment are not two separate things. Then she is simply gone. The play never settles what she is, and declines to on purpose.

Her powers follow from that double nature. She can pass for human indefinitely and drop the disguise at will, alter her size, pull darkness down early over her own slopes, work magic on anyone who accepts her roof, and shoulder loads no person could lift. Her appetite functions as a bottomless pit, and what it prefers is men and boys.

Her limits follow from the same logic. She holds her power in her own country and at her own hours, and a good half of the tales about her are practical instructions for surviving both. In Sanmai no ofuda, a temple boy who stays too late gathering chestnuts accepts her offer of a bed and wakes to the rasp of a whetstone. Three paper charms from his master buy his escape: one answers in his voice from the privy while he runs, one becomes a river, one becomes a wall of fire. She is greedy and she is literal, and both can be turned against her. In Tendō-san no kin no kusari a chain comes down from heaven for the fleeing children and she climbs after them, and it breaks, and she falls into a buckwheat field. Her blood ran down into the roots, they said afterwards, and that is why the stems of buckwheat are red.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Yama-uba?

Yama-uba is a yōkai of Japanese folklore, an old woman who lives alone deep in the mountains and eats the travellers she offers shelter to. Her name is also written yamauba, yamanba and yamamba, and she is called yamahaha, “mountain mother”, in Shikoku and southern Kyushu. Not every account makes her a monster; a sizeable body of tales has her rewarding kind visitors with treasure or good fortune.

What does the Yama-uba look like?

The Yama-uba appears as an aged woman with long, unkempt hair gone golden-white and a filthy, tattered kimono, which is exactly why travellers take her for a harmless grandmother. Regional tellings add horns, a single eye, or a second mouth concealed on the crown of her head beneath the hair. On Hachijō-jima she is described with sores on her body and her breasts slung over her shoulders with a cord.

How do you escape a Yama-uba?

In the folktales people escape the Yama-uba by cunning rather than force, usually by exploiting her greed and her literal-mindedness. In Sanmai no ofuda a temple boy uses three paper charms from his master, one to answer in his voice while he runs, one to raise a river, one to raise a wall of fire. In other tales she is boiled in her own rice pot while she sleeps, or falls to her death from a chain let down out of heaven.

Is the Yama-uba the mother of Kintarō?

In many Edo-period tellings, yes. Popular puppet drama of that era paired the Yama-uba with Kintarō, the immensely strong boy of Mount Ashigara who grew up to become the warrior Sakata no Kintoki, sometimes as his foster-mother and sometimes as his true mother gone wild in mountain exile. Kitagawa Utamaro produced roughly fifty prints of the two of them together around 1800.

Where does the Yama-uba come from?

The word first appears in written Japanese in the Muromachi period, as merchants and pilgrims began travelling deeper into the mountains and meeting the solitary women who lived there. One scholarly line traces her further back to the yama no kami, the mountain deity usually reckoned female, demoted over time from goddess to monster. Folk explanations point instead to women driven into the wilderness by accusation or by famine, including mothers abandoned in the hills when a household could no longer feed everyone.