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• 1 2020-03-14T03:39:15+00:00 The Ubume in the Konjaku Monogatarishū 31 Heian, Japan, roughly 1120 plain 2021-12-01T18:44:57+00:00
  The ubume first appears in writing around 1120 in the Konjaku Monogatarishū (The Tales of Times Now Past), a collection of spoken and passed-down stories central to defining the genre of setsuwa. Organized into books “Tales of India” (Tenjiku, 1-5), “Tales of China” (Shindan, 6-10), and “Tales of Japan” (Honcho 11-31), the Konjaku Monogatarishū contains roughly 1,040 tales, the majority of which—apart from those in “Tales of Japan”—appear in earlier texts. While the compilers’ identities are unknown, due to the overtly Buddhist messages of most of the parable-style tales, they are assumed to be written by Buddhist monks (Li 18).
  
  During the time of the Konjaku Monogatarishū’s compilation, many of the setsuwa shifted in tone, which is indicative of their change in audience. Used to enliven Buddhist sermons, setsuwa were initially aimed at aristocrats, but that changed during the Heian period (794-1185) due in part to Pure Land Buddhism. According to adherents of Pure Land, the world was preparing to enter Mappō: “ten thousand years of disorder, violence, and moral decay [that rendered] the attainment of enlightenment impossible for even very devout people” (Li 218). Although this future may not have been particularly desirable, Pure Land rose in popularity because it stressed the importance of faith over elaborate ritual or arduous study, which made it accessible to lower-class populations who had less time to dedicate to their religious practices. The impact of Pure Land’s influence can be seen in the setsuwa which stopped stressing the world’s beauties and instead focused on offering advice on how to make it through its treacheries.
  
  While such treacheries would have likely included the violence that occurred due to the decline of the aristocratic society, that is not the narrative offered by the Konjaku Monogatarishū. In order to secure a place for Buddhism in Japan’s future, it would have been in Buddhist monks’ best interest to paint a favorable picture of the rising warrior class, which the setsuwa’s passed-down nature helped them achieve. Because each tale begins with a phrase that translates approximately to “In olden times,” and ends with “and such is the tale as it has been handed down” (Allan and Koriyama 18), monks could imbue the stories with the authority of history while still being able to shape figures and plots to fit their agendas, particularly because many of the individuals they depict lack substantial documentation outside of the setsuwa. One such person is Taira no Suetake whose status as legendary warrior was partially solidified by his portrayal in the Konjaku Monogatarishū, despite having lived more than a century prior to its compilation. Through the setsuwa, Suetake becomes known as one of the Shitteno or Four Guardian Kings. A term that was initially used to describe pre-Buddhist deities incorporated into the pantheon to protect Buddha’s Law, Buddhists, and Buddhist countries, it would later be associated with outstanding men of valor who served under a military commander (Reider 15).
  
  The ubume appears in a story with Suetake titled “Yorimitsu’s Retainer, Taira no Suetake, Meets an Ubume.” Located within Book XXVII, “Tales of Malevolent Supernatural Creatures,” the themes of this book center around military honor and the supernatural. According to Komatsu Kazuhiko, from the seventh to seventeenth century, power and authority in Japan had “relied not only on the conquest of real enemies, but on the maintenance of symbolic control over surreal ‘demon’ enemies” (Figal 22-23). Such demonic conquest bolstered the heroism with which past warriors were regarded and offered the monks compiling the tales a tool to maintain favoritism with the military. The other historical figure mentioned in the ubume’s tale, Minamoto no Yorimitsu, was a general who fought for Fujiwara Michinaga. A vocal adherent to Pure Land Buddhism, Michinaga was considered to be the most influential of all Fujiwaras—a family that dominated Japanese court life for centuries “without a rival in controlling the national destiny from 857 to 1160” (Morton et al. 24). The Fujiwaras appear more than any other aristocratic family in setsuwa (Li 150), which is perhaps unsurprising given yōkai’s tie to the land and the Fujiwara’s cultivation of it.
  
  One of the Fujiwara’s most significant impositions on the land was the Taika Reform. An attempt at creating a centralized authority, the reform declared that all of Japan’s land belonged to the emperor. It allotted rice land to farmers that would be assessed for taxes by local headsmen and landowning nobles who were free from paying such taxes because they had been appointed to the court as provincial or lesser governors. To escape such taxes, many peasants would commend their land to a temple or official to whom they would pay a rent far less than the tax amount required (Morton et al. 46). As this continued, the tax base fell increasingly onto those who were least able to pay it, and eventually, the tax sources dried up, and the centralized government broke down.
   
  
  
  While the Fujiwaras helped construct the Taika Reform, they were not the ones hit hardest by its failure. As Japan entered a period of dispersed power overrun by regional feudal lords who were at war with one another, the Fujiwaras were able to assume government offices and maintain liaisons throughout the country (Morton et al. 46). The land, however, did not not adapt so well to this lack of centralized structure. As humans began to spread across the archipelago, they engaged in entrepreneurial commercial activity and increased their agricultural and material output, all of which led to deforestation, land clearance, and greater power available for exploitation by the elite (Totman 101, 93). Naoshi Koriyama and Bruce Allen note the impact of this transformation in the introduction to their translation of the Konjaku Monogatarishū:

  Along with the decline of the nobility’s power and the spread of Buddhist teachings to the common folk in rural areas, major ecological changes were transforming nature and culture in the countryside. Forests—along with their resident gods, spirits, ogres, demons, and other supernatural beings-were being cut down and pushed away to clear the land for cultivation. (19) .

  
  While the dominant military class would have been largely responsible for the land’s destruction, in the setsuwa, they are presented as though they protected the people from the land. This framing is evident in the term Shitteno’s origin—the Golden Light Sutra. In the sutra, the Buddha commands the Four Heavenly Kings to protect the king who receives, respects, and spreads the teaching of the sutra: “the Four Heavenly Kings warn that if a king fails to uphold the sutra, they will abandon his kingdom, and it will suffer various natural calamities” (Sango 4). Not only does this title of Shitteno strengthen the tie between the military and Buddhism, but it presents nature as an antagonistic force that only they could subdue. And so, while Suetake’s position as Yorimitsu’s retainer means he was likely a “warrior of ability” who helped exploit the townspeople he visited, he is described as though he was their savior. 
  
  In the tale, Suetake visits a town inside Mino Province where Yorimitsu serves as governor. He hears samurai gossip about a woman who is said to ask whomever crosses the Watari River to hold her baby, and when one of the samurai asks if anyone around is brave enough to cross this river, Suetake asserts to be. A samurai responds: “No, you might be able to fight a thousand enemies, but you won’t be able to cross that river now.” When Suetake insists, the samurai declares: “No matter how brave you may be, you’ll never be able to get across that river.”  But Suetake remains unperturbed and places a bet with the samurai, which, needless to say, he wins. Suetake makes the journey across the river and takes the ubume’s baby, and when he returns, his calm demeanor is shown to be a sharp contrast to the other samurai who were “terribly frightened” by the ubume, as well as the people who heard of Suetake’s feat and were “deeply impressed” (Koriyama and Allen 60). So courageous is Suetake that he does not even accept the men’s wagers. The journey was reward for him enough.
  
  Every piece of dialogue and description within this setuswa is framed to highlight Suetake’s bravery. If we recognize that was likely due to the monks’ desire to maintain good standing with the military, we can begin to see what else is being said. Based on the samurai’s reactions and the “awful, fishy smell” ascribed to the ubume (Koriyama and Allen 60), it’s clear she is intended to be frightening, and yet, it’s not the townspeople who complain about the ubume. It’s the samurai who would have been outsiders to this land, their primary residences being at the capital. Because supernatural creatures “lived, or appeared, at certain fixed locations” and “did not, as a rule, leave their own grounds and appear at other places” (Mori 149-150), it is likely that if humans had left the land undisturbed, they may have never encountered the ubume at all. This is evident within the story for when Suetake leaves the river, the ubume does not follow. Even her child turns to a pile of leaves in his arms, the supernatural relegated to stay within its realm. 
  
  It’s clear then that Suetake’s journey across the river is not done to free the town of any dangers, but to demonstrate his courage. In order to assuage doubts over whether he completed the task, Suetake sticks one of his arrows on the other side of the bank, the raw materials for which—along with Suetake’s “armor, a helmet, bows in a quiver” (Koriyama and Allen 60)—would have likely been “collected countrywide as part of the handicraft and special products taxes (chōyō) requisitioned from state-managed forests, mines and pastures” (Friday 63). During the Heian period, townspeople not only had their land depleted of resources by figures like Suetake and Yorimitsu, they had those resources turned against them when they were used to construct weapons the military could use to enforce submission to further exploitation.
  
  The Konjaku Monogatarishū did not create the ubume any more than it created Taira no Suetake, but it did pass on a narrative of the brave warrior to audiences who may never have believed it otherwise. As Li states, “people whose lifestyles and lives are threatened would find it less frightening to confront political and social struggles in terms of the extraordinary and the monstrous than to look hard at the true enemies: other people and time” (241). In a period when the warrior class was rising and many believed the world to entering a time of disorder and decay, the ubume offered common people a monster they could defeat, and in so doing, distracted them from seeing who and what there really was to fear.