No. 19 — Yamanba
A young temple boy of a mountain temple met a beautiful woman in the mountains and promised to meet her at night, but the priest saw through her true form as a yamanba, an old woman of the mountains who eats people, and gave him three charms to carry. The boy, pretending he needed to go to the toilet, tied a rope from his waist to a pillar in the yamanba's house and fled. With the power of the charms he made a thicket of thorns and a great river appear and drove off his pursuer, then returned to the temple, but the yamanba, pressing for the boy who was being hidden to be handed over, ate the priest to death instead. The boy was found inside a stone chest, having changed into a white dog.
- Land
- Shiwa District
- 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.