The Onibaba of Adachigahara and the Noh Play "Kurozuka" — Fear and Sorrow

What stays with you most in the Noh play "Kurozuka" is this: the onibaba becomes a demon at the very moment her promise is broken. She welcomes the travelers, spins thread while grieving over her life, and goes out to gather firewood for the cold night. Up to that point she is simply a lonely woman living by herself on a wild moor. The horror is not there from the start. It only appears when her one request, "please don't look," is betrayed.

Where the name "Kurozuka" comes from

Adachigahara is said to have been a stretch of open moorland around what is now Nihonmatsu City in Fukushima Prefecture. Its link with demons is old. A Heian-period poet, Taira no Kanemori, wrote a waka (a classical 31-syllable poem) asking whether it was true that a demon was hiding at Kurozuka ("the black mound") on the moor of Adachigahara in the far north. Some say the poem was originally a playful way of comparing certain women to "demons."

But the phrase "a demon lives at Kurozuka in Adachigahara" took on a life of its own, and over time it grew into the legend of a hag who preys on travelers. The Noh play "Kurozuka" brings that legend to the stage. Some schools of Noh perform it under the title "Adachigahara."

A lonely woman at her spinning wheel

In the first half of the play, a group of yamabushi (wandering mountain ascetics) on a pilgrimage reach Adachigahara at dusk and ask for shelter at a humble, lonely house. An old woman lets them in.

At their urging, she shows them how she works her spinning wheel. As she winds the thread, she laments how fleeting human life is, and how she has no choice but to live the way she does. The turning wheel, going round and round in the same place, is often read as an image of a mind caught in endless confusion.

There is almost no hint of a demon here. Instead, the audience feels the loneliness of a woman growing old on a remote moor, unknown to anyone. It is often said that the terror of the later scenes works precisely because of this quiet scene.

"Don't look" — a broken promise

As the night grows cold, the woman says she will go and gather firewood for her guests. Before she leaves, she asks just one thing: that they never look into her bedroom.

But one of the party's attendants cannot resist. He slides the door open, and inside lie heaps of human remains. Only then do the travelers realize that their host is the demon of Adachigahara they had heard rumors about.

Stories about seeing what you were told not to see turn up again and again in Japanese folktales and myths. In our Zukan, the Yuki-onna story also turns on a promise of silence (see "Yuki-onna and Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan"). The woman of Kurozuka, too, is someone who asked for her secret to be kept, and was betrayed.

The last image of the woman who became a demon

In the second half, the woman returns in the form of a demon and pursues the travelers. Her mask and costume have changed, and she seems a completely different being from the quiet woman before. The yamabushi rub their prayer beads and face her with the power of their prayers.

What lingers is how the demon is driven off. She does not vanish gloating or cursing. Instead, she is described as ashamed that her true form has been seen, and she fades into the night moor in grief. What the audience is left with may be less the thrill of a victory than pity for one woman.

She is a fearsome demon who attacks people, and at the same time a sad woman carrying a self she never wanted anyone to see. It seems fair to say that "Kurozuka" has been performed for so long because both of these faces live inside a single role.

Follow her in the Zukan and on the map

On the Onibaba page of our Zukan (the yokai picture book), you'll find her in pixel art, along with the sad legend that she was once a wet nurse. You can also find Adachigahara, the land of the legend, on the map. Read the quiet woman of the Noh stage and the terrifying hag of legend side by side, and the onibaba's story feels one layer deeper.