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Mountain Witches: YamaubaYamamba: In Search of the Japanese Mountain Witch

2023; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 82; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00219118-10290830

1752-0401

Catherine Ryu,

Asian Culture and Media Studies

With these two publications, 2021 was a bounteous year for scholarship on the yamauba (or its nasalized equivalent yamamba or yamanba), an enigmatic but familiar figure in Japanese folklore, religious narratives, literature, performance arts, and more. Traditionally considered to be a yōkai (supernatural creature), the yamauba is most closely associated with an old woman dwelling alone in the deep recesses of mountains, feared for her anthropophagus and insatiable appetite, especially for men and boys. At the same time, she is appreciated for offering succor to those in need of temporary shelter and performing domestic chores such as spinning. The two 2021 publications—the first scholarly monograph in English on the topic by Noriko Tsunoda Reider and an original collection of multifarious narratives and voices in English “for the yamamba” (8) edited by Rebecca Copeland and Linda C. Ehrlich—together open up new ways of engaging with this centuries-old figure, a multifaceted embodiment of the problematic relationship between women and the structure of power. Beyond the confines of Japanese society and culture, the significance of these publications richly resonates more broadly with ongoing critical discourses on the fear of and desire for women, as well as women's persistent resistance against the ideological forces that have denied and limited their power to occupy the position of the subject in their own lives.In the introduction, Reider states that “this study investigates the attributes of yamauba, and offers an interpretation through the examination of yamauba narratives including folklore, literary works, legends, modern fiction, manga, and anime” (4). From the outset, Reider thus renders it explicit that this monograph does not aim to argue for a particular theoretical position on, or interpretation of, the yamauba. Rather, her work is exploratory in nature (and at times speculative), presenting a holistic view of yamauba narratives as they have been transmitted to the present, while illuminating how the yamauba is constantly reimagined, transformed, and represented. With an overarching goal of “situating the yamauba within the construct of yōkai and archetypes” (4), the outcomes of Reider's exhaustive scholarly investigation take the form of six chapters, bookended with an introduction and a brief conclusion, which are broadly organized chronologically, each chapter delineating a set of related major aspects of the yamauba. In these chapters, moving through and crisscrossing times between the primordial era as captured in the creation myth in Kojiki or The Chronicle of Japan (712) and contemporary Japan as reflected in popular culture including anime and manga, Reider, in her multiple roles as a captivating storyteller, a well-informed critic, an expert translator, and an enthusiastic admirer of the yamauba, regales the reader with the multidimensional images of the yamauba and their varying significance.In chapter 1, tantalizingly titled “Man-Eating, Helping, Shape-Shifting Yamauba,” Reider explains these three key aspects of the yamauba that have been firmly established, while underscoring the intrinsic duality of this figure by tracing her positive and negative aspects as delineated in canonical materials from premodern times, including two seminal Noh plays, Yamamba and Kurozuka, from the Muromachi period (1336–1573). In chapter 6, “Yamamba Mumbo Jumbo: Yamauba in Contemporary Society,” Reider throws into high relief the enduring but altered figure of Yamauba, or “yamaubaesque” (145) embodiments, as shown, for example, in the short-lived subculture “yamaguro-gyaru” phenomenon from the late 1990s to the early 2000s in Shibuya, a popular Tokyo urban market space where teenaged girls congregated, self-fashioned markedly as “the other” with their signature dark heavy makeup and outfits. In Japanese anime and manga with their increasing global appeal, old women characters such as Yubaba in Spirited Away (2001) similarly harken back to the larger-than-life figure of the yamauba, which appears in the intervening chapters through an expanded and expanding palimpsest of her images that Reider meticulously delineates. This palimpsest includes oni (“demons, ogres, monsters,” to borrow Reider's English equivalents [6]), oni-woman, selfish stepmother, self-sacrificing wife, devouring mother, sake-loving crone, clairvoyant, helpless pregnant woman, femme fatale, flying witch, abandoned old woman, spider, spinner, and other gender-norm-defying heroines against the dramatic backdrops of piled-up skulls and corpses, fragmented body parts, terrifying thunderstorms, bloody births and deaths, apparitions, and so forth that disrupt the rhythms of mundane everydayness in villages, mountains, and urban dwellings along the edges of haunting dreamscapes.A plethora of yamauba manifestations as such are easily accessible to the reader, as the table of contents includes both descriptive chapter titles and detailed subheadings. On the one hand, each subsection (and at times sub-subsections), about one to three pages long, offers the reader a bite-size, as it were, encounter with yamauba narratives and the author's interpretations of the critical discourse surrounding them. On the other hand, the overall picture of the associated images and ideas surrounding the yamauba comes into focus when this monograph is read in its entirety. This work as a whole reveals that the yamauba is an integral aspect of the Japanese cultural imagination—one that Reider has illuminated in her previous publications: Tales of the Supernatural in Early Modern Japan: Kaidan, Akinari, Ugetsu Monogatari (2002); Japanese Demon Lore: Oni, from Ancient Times to the Present (2010); Seven Demon Stories from Medieval Japan (2016); and numerous other book chapters and articles on the same and related topics.One of the many meaningful takeaways is how Reider elucidates the linked concepts of the oni, oni-women, and yamauba through a temporally conceived spectrum. On one end of this spectrum, Reider places the oldest term, oni, to underscore the originary provenance of the cannibalistic aspect of what came to be known later through the appellation, yamauba, marking the other end of the spectrum. Yamauba, a compound noun, underscores an intimate link between the female gender and the mountain topos (i.e., outside social norms and communities), not readily apparent in the hyphenated expression, “oni-woman,” which marks the in-betweenness of the spectrum's two ends. Reider singularly emphasizes that the female-mountain link emerged in the Muromachi period, one of the darkest periods for women in the history of Japan. In other words, the implicit ideological thrust that sustains Reider's overall engagement with the yamauba in this publication is that, however fantastical and contradictory this figure might appear to be, she exists not in a vacuum but in relation to the lived reality and conditions that governed and shaped the perception, conception, and representation of women specifically as those of the other. Reider concludes the monograph by pointedly turning to Japan's imperial institution as a clear embodiment of persistent patriarchy that still denies in the twenty-first century the imperial family's female members their birthright to ascend to the throne. As such, this enduring institution represents the conditions in which the yamauba will continue to manifest herself in Japan.Whereas Reider's monograph paints the portrait of Yamauba with all her layered complexity over the centuries, Yamamba: In Search of the Japanese Mountain Witch, edited by Copeland and Ehrlich, is “an homage” (8) to the yamamba. More than simply representing “the first work in English to be written for the yamamba (8),” this homage demonstrates the process through which new yamamba accounts can emerge and converge—accounts that further amplify the symbolic significance of the yamamba while shedding new light on seminal yamamba narratives. The homage proffered comprises “eclectic responses engendered by the yamamba” (8). Each contributor, who responded to the coeditors' call for “their quest for the yamamba” (10), is in their own right a modern yamamba, or “yamaubaesque,” to borrow Reider's expression, unfettered from the geo-spatiotemporal specificities of the traditional yamamba deeply rooted in the figure of a lone Japanese crone roaming through the mountains. In that sense, this collection represents various kinds of shapes an homage can take, especially when contemporary yamambas (both male and female) from, or “shuffling” between, Japan and North America conjoin their creative visions and raise their voices to pay tribute to the yamamba apart from, and intersecting with, their varied scholarly and artistic endeavors, as well as educational engagements.None other than Reider's brief account of the yamamba constitutes one of the eclectic responses included in the publication, providing at the outset a scholarly introduction to this figure. In the subsequent eight responses, her multifarious attributes are newly delineated and freshly crafted in the form of interview, poetry, short story, and commentary. Following Reider's introduction, for instance, there appears an interview article by Ann Sherif, which shares her exchanges with two contemporary Japanese women Noh actors, Uzawa Hisa (mother) and Uzawa Hikaru (daughter), in this traditionally male-dominated theater, about their views on Yamamba, a seminal Noh play also discussed by Reider in chapter 1 of her monograph. The play, attributed to Zeami (1363–1443), concerns Hyakuma Yamamba, a young dancer, who has made a name for herself in the capital by performing the dance of a yamamba (or by “dancing the yamamba” [125] to borrow the title of the collection's final piece, another interview article that circles back to this Noh play and the female itinerant dancer) and who encounters a real yamamba during her pilgrimage and witnesses her formidable dance. Hisa and Hikaru generously share their accounts of encountering the yamamba in their full or partial performance of the piece, which entails a judicious selection of the mask, the costume including a wig, as well as control of the energy and tempo of delivery when reciting, chanting, or dancing. Through this interview, the reader gains a fresh understanding that the yamamba is not merely associated with the mountain but that she herself is the mountain, representing the power of nature and the Buddhist cosmology pertaining to the cyclicality of nature itself. To embody the yamamba on stage as such takes nothing less than the energy to move the mountain, both figuratively and literally. The realm of Yamamba thus transcends the modern notion of gender expressed through the binary terms male and female, though the yamamba character takes the form of a woman on stage.Hisa and Hikaru's deep engagements and encounters with the yamamba both on stage and throughout their professional journeys as Noh practitioners emblematically represent the nature of all the other contributors' encounters (as well as those of their fictional counterparts) with the yamamba in their respective artistic endeavors and pursuits, be it, for example, Ehrlich's poetic reflections, Yamamba's Mountains, accompanied by Ohmori Kayo's Japanese translation; Copeland's novella, “Blue Ridge Yamamba,” featuring a fifty-seven-year-old professor of Japanese mythology and her recurring encounters with a yamamba at her family cabin in the Appalachian Mountains; Laura Miller's commentary on her own creative process of constructing a mixed-media collage, in a vein similar to shadow boxes in Mexican and South American folk art, which functions as a veritable shrine to “Yamamba-chan” (72). Miller whimsically and purposefully celebrates the heterogenous, contradictory, and supernatural aspects of Yamamba with variegated elements adorning the shrine, including a fellow supernatural creature known as the kappa and cosplaying animals (the bunny Jizō and the cat kitsune), not to mention photos of yamamba girls, the focus of Reider's final chapter mentioned earlier, and David Holloway's short story, “An Encounter in Aokigahara,” building up to a fatal meeting between the protagonist K with a yamamba during his suicide trip disguised as a dissertation research excursion to Aokigahara (“the so-called ‘Suicide Forest’ of eastern Japan” [10], a site long associated with death and the yamamba as discussed in Reider's publication).The last three contributions in the collection seem to form a cluster of their own through the authors' sustained and interconnected engagements with the yamamba, further underscoring the conditions from which creative yamamba narratives can newly emerge. The first piece of this cluster is “The Smile of a Mountain Witch,” an English translation of Ōba Minako's (1930–2007) 1976 novella, “Yamamba no bishō,” which was originally translated by the contemporary scholar-poet, Noriko Mizuta Lippit (b. 1937), and published by M. E. Sharpe in the 1991 anthology of Japanese Women Writers coedited with Kyoko Iriye Selden. A story about a modern-day yamamba leading a life of self-denial from childhood to old age as daughter, wife, and mother, this English translation is what Copeland and Ehrlich identify in the editors' preface as the genesis of their collaborative pursuit of and engagement with the yamamba. Reider analyzes the same novella in her publication, tracing its textual sources for the protagonist's yamamba-derived mind-reading ability. Following this short story is Mizuta's contribution of ten poems introduced by Copeland and presented under the titles of “Yamamba of the Sato” (three poems translated by Copeland) and “Yamamba of the Mountains” (seven poems translated by Marianne Tarcov), which together highlight the two antithetical topoi associated with the yamamba—“village” and “mountain,” respectively signifying the locus of her domestication and freedom.The third piece in this cluster and the final eclectic response to the yamamba in the collection is Copeland's conversation with the award-winning choreographer and dancer Yokoshi Yasuko (b. 1961). The interview centers around Yokoshi's 2019 multimedia production, “Shuffleyamamba,” an experimental work coproduced with Gelsey Bell (an American composer, vocalist, and actor), which Yokoshi, an appreciative reader of Copeland's essay on the yamamba, invited her to attend at the Eirakukan, the oldest Kabuki theater in the Kansai region. Sparked by the Noh play Yamamba, the focal point of Sherif's aforementioned interview, Yokoshi approaches this “women-centered” (128) piece through her metaphorical reimagining of the encounter between Hyakuma Yamamba and a real yamamba as “the passing of knowledge, wisdom, and artistry among the female performance artists” (133). Yokoshi's vision is realized on stage through the bodies of dancers, whose choreographic storytelling is layered with, transformed by, and shuffled between Yokoshi's personal history (an immigrant who has resided in New York for over three decades) and her highly controversial contemporary dance production “Shuffle” (2003), a piece based on the goddess Izanami. Copeland's interview article brings into clear focus the relevance of the centuries-old figure of Yamamba to contemporary multimedia artistic pursuits across the Pacific Ocean and completes the kaleidoscopic homage that this collection pays to the yamamba, while reflecting each contributor's encounter with the yamamba, as well as the encounters between these contemporary yamambas linked through their shared passions for what the yamamba symbolizes to them individually and collectively.Despite their differing modes of engagement with the yamauba/yamamba, the two 2021 publications reviewed here resonate richly with one another, reinforcing and amplifying the potency, shape, and meaning that have been attributed to this figure, while opening up new ways of reimagining and rethinking the complexity of such critical notions as gender, body, creativity, knowledge, life, death, society, nature, and others beyond the delimited space of Japanese culture. At the same time, these publications in English render the yamamba accessible to a wide range of new audiences, inviting them in a compelling way to further explore the ideas presented therein. Complete with informative back matters (Reider's with a list of Japanese and Chinese names and terms, detailed notes, references, and index; Copeland and Ehrlich's with glossary, endnotes, and recommended reading), these two publications will productively serve as essential resources for a broad range of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary studies, including gender studies, folklore studies, religious studies, performance arts, media studies, translation studies, and many more within Japanese studies as well as their counterparts without. As such, the author and the coeditors of these yamauba/yamamba publications have made invaluable contributions toward nurturing the next generation of scholars, artists, dancers, writers, and poets by sharing not only the outcomes of their scholarly and creative endeavors but also their own personal engagements with the yamamba as an unlimited source of inspiration for self-exploration and discovery.