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 that was 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 Monogatarishū 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, they are assumed to be Buddhist monks due to the overtly Buddhist messages of most of the parable-style tales (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, and its accessibility made it particularly appealing to the lower classes. During the time of the Konjaku Monogatarishū’s compilation, this sect of Buddhism 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, the tone Buddhist lessons began to shift. Rather than stress the world’s beauties, the lessons preached advice on how to navigate its treacheries.
The Konjaku Monogatarishū often uses fantastic elements to portray such treacheries; nevertheless, the collection claims the events it depicts to be true. Because of the passed down-nature of the collection, it is able to navigate around issues of implausibility, each tale 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 could present them with the authority of history while shaping the figures and plots to fit their agendas. Such a tactic proved particularly effective because many of the figures within the tales lacked substantial documentation outside of the setsuwa. One such person is Taira no Suetake. Despite having lived more than a century prior to the Konjaku Monogatarishū’s compilation, Suetake 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). Through the setsuwa, Suetake became 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 Japanese anthropologist 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. General Yorimitsu fought for Fujiwara Michinaga—a vocal adherent of Pure Land Buddhism and member of the 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), which is 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; the peasants would then pay these temples/officials a rent that was 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 as the tax base fell more and more onto those least able to pay it.
The Fujiwaras helped construct the Taika Reform, but 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 adapted to the lack of centralized structure by assuming government offices that allowed them to maintain liaisons throughout the country (Morton et al. 46). The land, however, did 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:
While the dominant classes would have been the most responsible for such destruction of the land, 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 bestowing Suetake with the title of Shitteno strengthen the tie between the military and Buddhism, it presents nature as the antagonistic force that only warriors such as him can subdue. Suetake's position as Yorimitsu's retainer means he was likely a “warrior of ability,” and yet, he is instead presented as the people's savior.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)
Titled “Yorimitsu’s Retainer, Taira no Suetake, Meets an Ubume,” the tale itself takes place with Mino Province. Yorimitsu serves as the governor here, and when he visits, he hears samurai talk about a woman who is said to appear in the river of Watari where she asks whoever is crossing to hold her baby. When one of the samurai questions whether anyone around is brave enough to test this rumor and cross the river, Yorimitsu’s warrior Suetake asserts he is. 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.” Unperturbed, Suetake places a bet with the samurai, which he easily 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 townspeople who heard of Suetake’s feat and were “deeply impressed.” When Suetake arrives back, he refuses to even accept the men’s wagers, a final point to illustrate his noble character (Koriyama and Allen 60).
It is clear that “Yorimitsu’s Retainer, Taira no Suetake, Meets an Ubume” was written to frame the military in a positive light. As Michelle Osterfeld Li says in Ambiguous Bodies: Reading the Grotesque in Japanese Setsuwa Tales, 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 sanding with the military, we can shift the focus of the “authority,” which in this case would be Suetake, and see what else is being said.
Let us start with the description of the ubume. Based on the samurai’s reactions and the “awful, fishy smell” ascribed to her (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, and they would have been outsiders to this land as their primary residences were 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 say within its realm.
The reason Suetake completes his journey across the river isn’t that he wishes to free the town of danger; he wants to demonstrate his courage. To prevent any doubts over whether he completed the task, he 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 would have 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 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 sates, “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.
