The Ubume in the Konjaku Monogatarishū
The first written appearance of the ubume comes around 1120 in the Konjaku Monogatarishū (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 stories were 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, rendering 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). In response, Buddhist lessons began to shift and preach advice on how to make it through this world's treacheries rather than stressing its beauties.
Regardless of the fantastic elements within many of the parables, the Konjaku Monogatarishūshū claims the events it depicts to be true. The passed-down nature of the tales does create some freedom for interpretation, however, each one beginning with the phrase that translates approximately to "now it is the past" and ending 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 them with the authority of history while shaping the figures and plots to fit their agendas, particularly because many of the figures within the tales lacked substantial documentation outside of the setsuwa. One such person is Taira no Suetake who had his status as legendary warrior solidified by his roles in tales as “Yorimitsu’s Retainer, Taira no Suetake, Meets an Ubume” (Reider 14-15) despite having lived more than a century prior to the Konjaku Monogatarishūshū's 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, and would later be applied to outstanding men of valor under a military commander (Reider 15).
The story in which Suetake and the ubume appear is located within Book XXVII, “Tales of Malevolent Supernatural Creatures,” the themes of which 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 who were compiling the tales a tool to maintain favoritism with the military that was emerging as the dominant class. The other historical figure mentioned in the ubume's tale, Minamoto no Yorimitsu, further supports the ties between Buddhism and the military as the general 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). Indeed, 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.
The first generation of the Fujiwara clan, Fujiwara no Kamatari helped construct one of the most significant impositions on the land during this time—the Taika Reform. An attempt at creating a centralized authority, the reform declared all land of Japan as belonging to the emperor. It allotted rice land to farmers that would be assessed for taxes by local headsmen and landowning nobles who were 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 required (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 more and more onto those least able to pay it. Yet, despite being a creation of the Fujiwaras, they did not flounder at its failure. As Japan entered a period of dispersed power overrun by regional feudal lords at war with one another, the family was able to assume government offices and maintain liaisons throughout the country (Morton et al. 46).
The lack centralized structure did not bode so well for the land, however. Humans began to spread across the archipelago, engage in entrepreneurial commercial activity and increase agriculture and material output, all of which led to deforestation, land clearance, and greater power available for exploitation by the elite (Totman 101, 93). In the introduction to their translation of the Konjaku Monogatarishūshū, Naoshi Koriyama and Bruce Allen note this transformation:
“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 italics added)
While it is clear the dominant classes were those most responsible for the land's destruction, that is not the narrative the setsuwa offers. Instead, warriors were presented as protecting the people from the land, a position 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 the antagonistic force that only they can subdue. Thus, while Suetake's position as Yorimitsu's retainer means he was likely a “warrior of ability,” a person who accompanied provincial governors to prevent resistance and maximize tax collection (Friday 8-9), he is instead presented as the people's savior.
The tale itself is set within a town inside Mino Province where Yorimitsu serves as governor. When Yorimitsu takes a trip there, he hears samurai talk of a rumor in which a woman is said to appear in the river of Watari and ask whomever is crossing to hold her baby. When one of the samurai questions whether anyone around is brave enough to cross the 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 crosses the river 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 Suetake's 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 (Koriyama and Allen 60).
Every piece of dialogue and description here is framed to Suetake's bravery. In Ambiguous Bodies: Reading the Grotesque in Japanese Setsuwa Tales, Michelle Osterfield Li describes how the selection of those who encounter demons often indicates privilege and power, the monsters able to be tamed or converted to serve the interests of authority (153). If we accept that the tale was written by monks who would want to maintain good standing with the military, we can shift the focus off of the “authority,” which in this case would be Suetake, and look 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. However, it is worth noting that it is not the townspeople who complain about the ubume, but the samurai who would have been outsiders to this land, their primary residences being in 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. When Suetake leaves the river, she does not follow, and even her child turns to a pile of leaves in his arms, the supernatural relegated to stay within its realm.
It becomes clear then that Suetake's journey across the river is not done to free the town of any dangers, but to demonstrate his courage. To prevent any 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). Common people therefore not only had their land depleted of resources by figures like Suetake and Yorimitsu, but 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 Monogatarishūshū 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.
