The Two Faces of the Yamauba: The Hag Who Gives Chase, the Spirit Who Roams the Mountains, and Kintaro's Mother

Few yokai change their faces as much as the yamauba does, depending on who is telling the story. In folktales, she's a terrifying mountain woman who chases children and travelers without end. On the Noh stage, she's a mountain spirit who secretly helps with mountain work. In ukiyo-e woodblock prints, she's a gentle mother cradling the boy Kintaro. All of them are the same "yamauba." Following these two faces shows us how people long ago saw the mountains themselves.

The folktale yamauba gives chase

Let's start with the frightening face.

One well-known folktale is "The Three Charms" (Sanmai no Ofuda). A young temple boy goes into the mountains to gather chestnuts, night falls, and he's given a bed in a lonely house, only to find the old woman there is a yamauba. He escapes using charms the head priest gave him, and each time he wishes on one, a great river or mountain appears in the yamauba's path to slow her down. The details differ from telling to telling, but the breathless chase is the same everywhere.

There's also a folktale called "The Ox Driver and the Yamauba" (Ushikata Yamauba). An ox driver hauling goods along a mountain road meets a yamauba, who eats his load piece by piece and finally eats the ox itself. Then the lonely house where he hides turns out to be the yamauba's own home, and from there the story turns the tables.

In both stories, the yamauba is "something deep in the mountains that people can't handle." You can feel how frightening a mountain road after dark must have been in the old days.

The Noh play "Yamamba": roaming the mountains, helping people

The Noh play "Yamamba," traditionally credited to Zeami, shows a completely different yamauba.

In the capital lived an entertainer famous for a dance about the yamauba, so famous she was nicknamed "Hyakuma Yamamba." On a pilgrimage to Zenkoji Temple, she's caught by nightfall on a steep mountain road on the border of the old provinces of Echigo and Etchu. A woman appears and offers her lodging. The woman reveals that she is the real yamauba, and asks to hear her famous yamauba song.

When the yamauba appears that night, she tells of her life. She wanders from mountain to mountain, sometimes shouldering a woodcutter's heavy load, sometimes helping a woman at her loom. Out of sight, she quietly keeps company with the life of the mountains. Then she dances her mountain-roaming dance and vanishes from peak to peak. Here she's no man-eating monster, but a vast and lonely presence, almost like the mountain itself.

The mother who raised Kintaro

Another gentle face is the yamauba as the mother of Kintaro. Kintaro, said to have grown up on Mount Ashigara wrestling with bears, is said to have later become a warrior named Sakata no Kintoki. In Edo-period bunraku puppet plays and kabuki, his mother, who bore and raised him in the mountains, came to be portrayed as a yamauba.

The ukiyo-e artist Kitagawa Utamaro drew the yamauba and Kintaro again and again. What we see there is a young mother with long hair and a lively, red-skinned little boy. She hardly seems related to the yamauba of the folktales.

Fear and kindness are one

In Japanese folklore studies, there's a view that the yamauba was originally tied to the worship of mountain deities. The mountains gave people nuts and game, firewood and water, but they were also a place where getting lost could cost your life. The kindness that gives, and the fierceness that keeps people away: perhaps that double nature of the mountains came to be pictured as a single woman, the yamauba.

It's also fun to compare her with the Onibaba, who lurks in a lonely house on a wild moor. You'll find the yamauba's lore on the Yamauba page of our Yokaipedia, and the tales of another mountain yokai, the Tengu, are there too.