Ubume and the Night Bird: Why a Mother's Ghost in Japan Bears the Name of a Chinese Bird

The ubume is a yokai told of as the ghost of a woman who died giving birth. Her name can be written with the characters for "birth" and "woman." But it is also often written with three other characters, read in Chinese as "guhuo niao." That was originally the name of a bird spirit from China, one that flies by night. Why would a Japanese ghost who appears in human form be given the name of a bird? Follow the thread, and you find two faraway places telling of a very similar sorrow.

Two ways to write one name

In Japan, the ubume is described as a woman standing at night by a river or at the foot of a bridge, with a baby in her arms. Writing her name as "birth-woman" simply describes what she is.

The bird name, on the other hand, has neither "birth" nor "woman" in it. Even so, in books and pictures from the Edo period (1603-1868), it became common to write the bird's characters and read them as "ubume." The yokai painter Toriyama Sekien, in his picture book Gazu Hyakki Yagyo, drew a woman holding a baby under the bird's name. (You can read more about him in Toriyama Sekien and Gazu Hyakki Yagyo.)

The night bird of China

Old Chinese writings describe a bird spirit by this name. It flies about at night. Wearing its feathers, it is a bird; taking them off, it becomes a woman. And it is said to carry off other families' children to raise as its own.

This bird was also said to be a woman who had died in childbirth, changed into a new form. A mother who gave birth but never got to hold her child becomes a bird, searching for children night after night. There was even an old warning that if you left a child's clothes hanging outside overnight, the bird would take notice.

The Japanese ubume and the Chinese bird look different and do different things. But they are firmly linked by two things: a mother who died in childbirth, and a child. It is thought that scholars and artists of the Edo period noticed this link and laid the Chinese bird's name over the Japanese ghost.

Cloth by the river: nagare-kanjo

It may be no accident that ubume stories so often take place by a river.

In many parts of Japan, a memorial custom called nagare-kanjo was held for women who had died in childbirth. A cloth was stretched out beside a river, and passersby were asked to pour water over it with a ladle. People are said to have believed that once the cloth's color faded away under all that water, the woman who had died would be freed from her suffering.

Asking a stranger passing by for just a little help. The ubume by the river, asking someone to hold her child, seems somehow to overlap with this scene.

A story about a mother's love

The tale of a baby that grows heavier and heavier in your arms is covered on the konaki jiji's Yokaipedia page and its story, so here is a different one.

All over Japan, there are also tales known as "kosodate yurei," the ghost who raised her child. Every night, the same woman comes to a shop to buy candy. Puzzled, the shopkeeper follows her, and she vanishes at a grave. From beneath the earth comes the sound of a baby crying. The mother had died, her baby had been born in the grave, and she had been coming each night to buy candy to feed it.

The ubume and the ghost who raised her child are both told as frightening tales, yet at their heart is a mother's love for her child. On the ubume's Yokaipedia page, Pixel Yokai draws her as a woman with long hair, holding a swaddled baby to her chest, with a night river flowing at her feet.

The tale of the ubume by the river is also a way that people long ago quietly passed down the grief of losing someone.