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Mountain Witches: Yamauba

2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 135; Issue: 537 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/15351882.135.537.16

1535-1882

Fumihiko Kobayashi,

Japanese History and Culture

Despite sometimes laughable stories and far-fetched images, many mysterious human-formed creatures inhabit folk cultures around the globe. They are not figments of our pure imagination; some of these creatures represent actual human disasters, and some embody societal injustice and inequalities. In the Japanese folk cultural context, yamauba mountain witches are such figures. Even though they seem familiar, we still have not entirely identified their origins nor why they still appear in twenty-first-century Japanese pop-cultural scenes. Yamauba indeed often mystify us, but now Noriko Tsunoda Reider's Mountain Witches: Yamauba provides us with some clues to explain them or, at least, to help us understand what their stories and appearances signify.Reider focuses on the narratives and iconographies associated with yamauba, describing how femaleness has come to be portrayed in the form of such fictive female figures. Yamauba do not always confine themselves to folktales and Noh texts, but also walk around openly in contemporary Japanese cultural arenas. Though sometimes described as affectionate and sometimes as demonic female figures, yamauba play a significant role in making Japanese folk culture attractive and dynamic. Thus, Reider raises two questions to expand on her argument: “What is the appeal of yamauba and what do yamauba have to say to us in present Japanese society?” (p. 20). This leads us to reconsider what we know about yamauba not only in traditional lore but also in their expressive pop-cultural forms.In order to portray yamauba's characteristics, Reider enumerates their multifarious features—as recorded across a wide span of materials from folklore and Noh plays to contemporary pop-cultural trends. Some of these materials characterize a yamauba as “an enigmatic woman living in the mountains” (p. 3), but others use the term to connote “the ambivalent status of Japanese women past and present, as well as the Japanese psyche that creates and re-creates prototypes” (p. 3). This characterization represents exactly the duality that Reider identifies in her book as yamauba's most compelling trait. For example, Japanese folk narratives and Noh texts usually portray yamauba as embodying two contradictory features. Reider notes that “although the malevolent yamauba and the benevolent yamauba look incompatible with each other, they are two sides of the same coin” (p. 51). In line with this reasoning, she observes: “The major characteristics of a yamauba are that she lives in the mountains, brings death and destruction as well as wealth and fertility, possesses the duality of good and evil, and has the power of transformation, able to manifest herself as an ugly crone or a young beauty” (p. 52).These characteristics lead Reider to observe that a “yamauba has been associated with childbirth and fertility, revealing an aspect of yamauba as a goddess of the mountains” (p. 53), and, moreover, “her [yamauba's] penchant for eating human flesh—and eating flesh goes with drinking blood” (p. 73). The image of the yamauba in folk narratives and literary texts consists of auspicious aspects such as childbirth and fertility, and cruel traits of man-eating and bloodsucking. However, when we realize that her bloodsucking behavior results from the “attempt to supplement the loss of [female yōkai's or weird creatures'] own blood during childbirth” (p. 73), we understand that the narrative and iconographies of yamauba take root in real hardship that women faced in pre-modern Japan (and, of course, even today). The symbolic association of childbirth and bloodsucking that yamauba exhibit evoked “a mixture of reverence and fear” (p.80) among all Japanese in pre-modern times.Reider also examines the vibrant activities of yamauba-like or yamaubaesque figures in various contemporary cultural trends in Japan, such as manga, anime films, and yamanba-gyaru (yamauba-like makeup for young females), noting that “duality is a major characteristic of the yamauba” (p. 162) and that “a list of yamauba's characteristics shows that she is truly full of contradictions—like human nature . . . she is a projection of human characteristics, with all their desires and fears. . . . Modern and ancient, powerful in their ability to express the human condition, yamauba can always be reimagined” (p. 164).Thus, yamauba duality as one of the foundations of Japanese culture's attractiveness and dynamism helps us understand why yamauba lore never faded away from Japanese cultural arenas or, rather, why yamauba's inexplicability continuously invigorates contemporary cultural trends even in twenty-first century Japan. In this regard, Reider successfully shows how yamauba have ceaselessly enacted symbolic associations for femaleness in Japanese society since their first appearance in folk cultural arenas. The femaleness, in this case, never means meekness and obedience to societal irrationality, but rather unyielding determination to navigate predicaments that women have encountered in their communities both in the past and the present. Yamauba and yamaubaesque figures never accept such circumstances against women, varying their appearances by time and place so as to make femaleness more influential to the Japanese culture.Yamauba-like female-formed weird creatures may be observed in other cultures’ folk traditions, such as Baba Yaga and other witches in European cultures. Reider refers to these creatures as “Western/Eurasian counterparts of the yamauba figure” (p. 3), but her argument does not go so far as to compare yamauba and those counterparts. Thus, it is not explained whether such creepy female-formed counterparts in other cultures also evince forms of social absurdity against women or simply work as fantastic female-formed figures to get audiences’ attention. It would also be interesting to hear more about how social multi-faceted outcomes of yamauba lore would be explained and understood at the global community level in comparison with their counterparts found in various other cultures. Nevertheless, this book is highly recommended. Those who wonder why imaginary creatures always inhabit folk traditions will learn that such creatures are not simply fanciful strangers, but rather (like yamauba) embody the sociocultural components from which they are created. Mountain Witches opens a new chapter on those mysterious human-formed creatures, not only in Japanese folk traditions but also on stages worldwide.