No. 50 — The wife who ate nothing

Record

A single man was working in the mountains, and when he told his companions that he wanted a wife who ate nothing, such a woman appeared and became his wife. But since the rice and miso kept diminishing, the man watched her closely, and saw her throwing large quantities of rice balls into a large mouth on the top of her head. When he learned she was a yamanba, an old woman of the mountains who eats people, she tried to kill him, but he escaped into a thicket of mugwort and iris and avoided harm. From then on, people began to put mugwort and iris at the eaves of their houses.

Source

Ogasawara Kenkichi (ed.), Shiwa-gun Mukashibanashi-shu (1938) — National Diet Library Digital Collections (Japanese text)

Land

Shiwa District

Type

Yokai and the Uncanny, Taboos and Customs, Origins of Plants and Animals

Beings

yamanba

This is an English rendering of our short Japanese summary of the source tale — a summary translated from the Japanese, not a translation of the original text. The summary was drafted and translated with AI assistance, and names and numbers were checked against our records. Tale numbers for this book follow the order in which the tales appear; they are ours, not the book's.