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Mountain Witches: Yamauba by Noriko Tsunoda Reider, and: Yamamba: In Search of the Japanese Mountain Witch by Rebecca Copeland and Linda C. Ehrlich

2023; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jjs.2023.0013

1549-4721

Toby Slade,

Chinese history and philosophy

Reviewed by: Mountain Witches: Yamauba by Noriko Tsunoda Reider, and: Yamamba: In Search of the Japanese Mountain Witch by Rebecca Copeland and Linda C. Ehrlich Toby Slade (bio) Mountain Witches: Yamauba. By Noriko Tsunoda Reider. Utah State University Press, 2021. xiv, 224 pages. $25.95, paper; $20.95, E-book. Yamamba: In Search of the Japanese Mountain Witch. Edited by Rebecca Copeland and Linda C. Ehrlich. Stone Bridge Press, 2021. 151 pages. $18.95, paper; $9.99, E-book. The yamamba, also rendered as yamanba and yamauba, is a celebrated and ubiquitous character in Japanese artforms as various as folklore, nō theater, poetry, film, literature, ukiyoe, manga, anime, and even contemporary fashion. She is most commonly represented as a solitary, elderly woman, living in the mountains, in possession of mysterious powers and really big hair. The role she plays can be enigmatic: perhaps a deity, a demon ( oni), or monster (yōkai); perhaps fearsome and malevolent; perhaps benevolent and maternal. It has been suggested the yamamba represents a rage at abandonment and the misogyny visited on women in the later stages of their lives. The societal scorn and misunderstanding of dementia has also been suggested as a historical source of their personae and perhaps even a cautious celebration of the wisdom of an unraveling mind. Yamamba were and continue to be admired for their freedom and their ability to resist the heavy conventions and obligations of Japanese social life and enjoy the liberty, of albeit shabby, independence. Originally the product of a medieval worldview, combining awe and fear of mountains, strange old women, and the changing seasons—both actual and as a metaphor for stages of life—they remain a relevant character and symbol to explain and explore the complexities of contemporary Japanese womanhood. Two recent works embrace these contradictions and explore the divergent aspects of the yamamba : Noriko Tsunoda Reider's historical monograph, Mountain Witches: Yamauba, and Rebecca Copeland and Linda Ehrlich's whimsical and beguiling edited collection, Yamamba: In Search of the Japanese Mountain Witch. Whereas Copeland and Ehrlich prefer to use the [End Page 171] nasalized form yamamba, more commonly used in nō and kabuki theater, Reider prefers yamauba, a rendering used more in folkloric texts, in line with her heavy reliance on and analysis of those sources. The yamauba form is mentioned in the Nippo-jisho (Japanese-Portuguese dictionary) compiled by the Jesuits in 1603–4, while the yamamba form was adopted by the rebellious schoolgirls engaged in extreme tanning, outrageously loud fashions, and provocative forms of feminine display in the late 1990s. This gives us some idea of the scope of the investigation of the archetype being attempted. Reider, a folklore and medieval specialist, focuses the first four chapters of her book on what has clearly been her life's work: a dizzyingly broad and fascinatingly rich assemblage of historical and literary sources referencing yamauba. She casts even the most ancient goddesses described in the earliest mytho-histories as prototype yamauba with connections to the mountain landscape. One of Reider's central arguments wants to demonstrate how an increasing number of narratives featuring yamauba coincides with a decline in the status and rights of women within the Neoconfucianism of the Edo period. Situating yamauba within the broader construct of yōkai (monsters) allows the book to develop a taxonomy as inclusive as possible and thus to map the process of adaption and reinvention of the archetype onto social change. The early modern period in Japan is often described as a dark age for women with economic power and social freedoms being radically curtailed and virolocal customs reflecting rising misogyny, such as the new term for divorce, oidasu, literally meaning to chase out a wife. Reider explains the popularity of yamauba as speaking to powerful suppressed emotions—passion, jealousy, and rage—that women would have felt as society saw them more and more as possessions, and as their social standing fell. In a social structure that valued women mainly as potential mothers, once age precluded motherhood their status fell even further. Reider places great emphasis on the mountainous location of yamauba, this being a defining feature not necessarily associated with other foreign folkloric crones. Mountains were...