Yamamba: The Japanese Mountain Witch
Or Why Single Old Women Are So Scary!!!
Deep in the Japanese mountains where the cryptomeria are thick and time is forgotten, you may encounter a woman. She lives alone in a modest hut spinning thread. Content to watch the wheel turn round and round, to let the moon and sun spin past, she asks for nothing and bothers no one.
But every now and then, as night falls, a man will stumble along her path, or sometimes two men, or an entire retinue of traveling priests, and they will beg her to take them in for the night. Perhaps they lost their way, or maybe they misjudged the speed of the sun’s descent and found the woods growing darker than expected.
She declines their request at first. Her hut is small and hardly fit for men as fine as these, dressed in palace vestments or temple finery. She is poor. Besides, she thinks but doesn’t say, why should I be responsible for their inability to read a map or tell time. Still, the men persist, and she takes pity on them. Perhaps for one night, then.
“Don’t open the door to the inner room,” she warns as she heads out into the woods to collect kindling. She’ll need to feed the fools.
So what do you think they do the minute she is out of sight?
You already know.
They poke their noses right where she told them not to. And when they do, they discover to their horror that her inner room, her forbidden chamber, is full of the corpses and bones of all the men who came before them — of the men who could not keep their hands to themselves or their noses out of her business.
The woman is a yamamba, Japan’s mountain witch.
Before she even returns to her hut, she feels the sharp scrape of the men’s scrutiny. She sees herself now through their eyes. She is not a kindly old woman living alone spinning thread. She is a monster. Or she is when she wants to be.
And she wants to be when busybodies turn to look at her in horror.
She chases the men, her horns in full view, her fangs gleaming.
They get away. They have to. Someone has to tell the story. They get away by reciting sutras and relying on the benevolent power of the Buddha to protect them.
And she is forced to burrow deeper and deeper into the mountain fastness.
The yamamba is one of Japan’s more interesting yōkai. She combines fear of women with fear of the extraordinary — the long-lived and the solitary. Her connection with mountains only accentuate her association with mystery and the mercurial forces of nature.
The yamamba is not all bad. Like many Japanese oni/kami, she is a complex figure with aspects that are as benevolent as they can be malevolent. She’s been known to help the farmer with his labors and the weaver with her loom. The yamamba’s innate power, her isolation, and her refusal to be contained have made her popular with modern and contemporary women artists in Japan.
For more on the attraction to the yamamba and the way she has inspired creative work in Japan and abroad, take a look at Yamamba: In Search of Japan’s Mountain Witch, edited by Rebecca Copeland and Linda C. Ehrlich, Stone Bridge Press, 2021.
