Despite sometimes laughable stories and far-fetched images, many mysterious human-formed creatures inhabit folk cultures around the globe. They are not figments of our pure imagination; some of these creatures represent actual human disasters, and some embody societal injustice and inequalities. In the Japanese folk cultural context, yamauba mountain witches are such figures. Even though they seem familiar, we still have not entirely identified their origins nor why they still appear in twenty-first-century Japanese pop-cultural scenes. Yamauba indeed often mystify us, but now Noriko Tsunoda Reider's Mountain Witches: Yamauba provides us with some clues to explain them or, at least, to help us understand what their stories and appearances signify.
Reider focuses on the narratives and iconographies associated with yamauba, describing how femaleness has come to be portrayed in the form of such fictive female figures. Yamauba do not always confine themselves to folktales and Noh texts, but also walk around...
