The Ubume in the Konjaku Monogatarishū
The first written appearance of the ubume comes around 1120 in the Konjaku Monogatarishūshū (The Tales of Times Now Past), a collection of setsuwa central to the defining the genre. Organized into books “Tales of India” (Tenjiku, 1-5), “Tales of China” (Shindan, 6-10), and “Tales of Japan” (Honcho 11-31), the Konjaku Monogatarishūshū contains roughly 1,040 tales, the majority of which appear in prior texts apart from those in “Tales of Japan.” While the identity of the compilers is unknown, due to the overtly Buddhist messages of most of the parable-style tales, they are assumed to be Buddhist monks (Li 18).
As many of the parables had been at one point used to enliven Buddhist sermons, initially the audience for such setsuwa would have been aristocrats. During the Heian period (794-1185), however, a more accessible strain of Buddhism rose in popularity known as Pure Land Buddhism. Rather than elaborate ritual or arduous study of doctrine, Pure Land stressed faith, its accessibility making it particularly appealing to the lower classes. During the time of the Konjaku Monogatarishūshū’s compilation, this sect of Buddhism would have believed the world to be entering Mappō—“ten thousand years of disorder, violence, and moral decay, [that rendered] the attainment of enlightenment impossible for even very devout people” (Li 218). In this stage, the most one could wish for was rebirth in the Western Paradise or Pure Land where becoming a Buddha was relatively easy (Morton et al. 41), and in response, Buddhist lessons began to shift in emphasis, preaching advice on how to manage the world's treacheries rather than stressing its beauties.
Despite the fantastic elements within many of the parables, the Konjaku Monogatarishūshū claims the events that unfold within its pages to be true, although the passed-down nature of the tales do create some freedom for interpretation, each one beginning with the phrase that translates approximately to "now it is the past" and ends with “and such then is the story as it has been handed down” (Li 27). By setting the stories in an ambiguous past, the monks were able to present the stories with the authority of history while shaping the figures and plots according to fit their agendas. In fact, many of the figures within the tales lack documentation outside of the setsuwa, an example of which can be seen in Taira no Suetake whose status as legendary warrior was informed by his roles in such tales as “Yorimitsu’s retainer, Taira no Suetake, meets an ubume” (Reider 14-15).
This story is located within Book XXVII, “Tales of Malevolent Supernatural Creatures,” in which the themes 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). Not only could such demonic conquest bolster the heroism with which past warriors were regarded, but it offered benefits to the monks looking to maintain a place for Buddhism in a society that was seeing the military emerge as the dominant class.
Another historical figure mentioned in the ubume's tale—Minamoto no Yorimitsu, a general of the mid-Heian period who fought for Fujiwara Michinaga. An 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). Out of all the aristocratic families who appear in setsuwa, it is the Fujiwaras who appear most (Li 150), perhaps unsurprising given yōkai’s tie to the land and the Fujiwara’s cultivation of it.
It was a Fujiwara who helped construct the Taika Reform, an attempt at creating a centralized authority by declaring all land of Japan as belonging to the emperor. Under the reform, rice land was allotted to farmers for the assessment of taxes by local headsmen and landowning nobles appointed to the court as provincial or lesser governors. To escape such taxes, many peasants would commend their land to a temple or official who had been granted tax exemption and pay a rent far less than the tax amount (Morton et. al. 46). This happened more and more until tax sources eventually dried up, and the centralized government broke down, the tax base falling onto those least able to pay it. This did not stop the Fujiwaras, however, as the family stepped in to assume government offices and maintain liaisons throughout the country (Morton et al. 46).
The land did not bode as well from the Taiko Reform's failure, however. Without its centralized structure, humans began to spread across the archipelago, engaging in entrepreneurial commercial activity and increased agriculture and material output, both of which led to deforestation, land clearance, and a greater power potential available for exploitation by the elite (Totman 101, 93). In their translation of the Konjaku Monogatarishūshū, Naoshi Koriyama and Bruce Allen note in the introduction:
“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).
Yorimitsu’s retainer, Suetake also becomes knows as one of the Four Guardian Kings, or Shitteno, a position that placed him as the intermediary between people and the land. The term originates from the Golden Light Sutra, in which 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 the antagonistic force that only they can subdue. And so, in the ubume's tale, Suetake is framed as protector despite the likelihood that he would have been one of Yorimitsu’s “warriors of ability,” a person provincial governors often incorporated into their entourage to prevent resistance and maximize tax collection (Friday 8-9).
On a visit to a town within Mino Province, its governor Yorimitsu hears samurai talk about a rumor in which a woman is said to appear in the river of Watari where she asks whomever is crossing to hold her baby. When one of the samurai questions whether anyone around is brave enough to cross the river, Suetake speaks up. A samurai responds: “No, you might be able to fight a thousand enemies, but you won’t be able to cross that river now” (Koriyama and Allen 60). Suetake insists, and the samurai follows with “No matter how brave you may be, you’ll never be able to get across that river,” such dialogue emphasizing Seutake’s bravery and ensuring that is where the reader or listener's focus remains. Unperturbed, Suetake places a bet with the samurai, which, needless to say, he succeeds. Suetake crosses the river where and takes the ubume’s baby, his calm demeanor a sharp contrast to the other samurai who were “terribly frightened” by the ubume, as well as the people who heard of his feat and were “deeply impressed.” When Suetake arrives back, he does not even accept the men’s wagers, a final point to illustrate his noble character.
While Suetake may be portrayed as courageous within this setsuwa, when we understand the motives behind such a representation, we can begin to look at what else the tale is saying. As Michelle Li states: “Who encounters demons and what happens to them as a result often indicate privilege and power…monsters can be tamed or converted to serve the interests of authority” (153). If we shift the focus off of the “authority,” which in this case would be Suetake, we can identify a little bit more about the perspectives of the land. Based on the samurai’s reactions and the “awful, fishy smell” ascribed to the ubume, it’s clear she is intended to be frightening. However, it is not the townspeople who complain about the ubume, but samurais who would have been outsiders to this land, their primary residences being in the capital. The ubume remains in the center of a river, and as 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), should humans had left the land undisturbed, they never would have encountered the ubume at all. Her fixed location becomes further evident when Suetake refuses to give the ubume her baby back, later revealing the child to the samurai only to find a pile of leaves instead.
It becomes clear then that Suetake does not agree to cross the river to free the town of the ubume’s wrath, but rather, to serve his own ego, even proving his journey across the river by sticking one of his bows stuck on the other side of the bank—a clear mark of conquest. And it is that arrow—along with his “armor, a helmet, bows in a quiver”—that may have been the only true threat to the land as such weapons' raw materials like iron, wood, leather, cloth, bamboo, and feathers “were collected countrywide as part of the handicraft and special products taxes (chōyō) [and] requisitioned from state-managed forests, mines and pastures” (Friday 63). Not only does the exchange between Suetake and the ubume then serve to represent the elite's conquest of the land, but the debris it left behind in the process.
The Konjaku Monogatarishūshū did not create the ubume any more than it created Taira no Suetake, but it did help create the narrative of the brave warrior and spread it among populations 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” (Li 241). While the ubume may have resonated with common people looking for a monster they could defeat, she also distracted them from seeing who and what there really was to fear.
