No. 46 — The cowherd and the yamanba

Record

When night fell on a cowherd in the mountains, he called out half in jest, with his leftover fish soup, "Come and eat this," and a yamanba, an old woman of the mountains who eats people, appeared and ate up both the fish soup and the cow. He fled to a lone house, where a woman hid him in a chest, but she too was in truth a yamanba. She opened a hole in the chest and poured in hot water, and at last killed the cowherd and took his money.

Source

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

Land

Shiwa District

Type

Yokai and the Uncanny

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.