At the beginning of her Jungian analysis of popular Japanese female archetypes, Hayao Kawai postulates that dangerous supernatural creatures can represent misunderstood and marginalized people or inscrutably evil forces of (human) nature, depending the angle of analysis that a reader applies to a story. His analyses, those of Akiko Baba and Noriko Reider demonstrate that characters such as Yamamba and Yuki-Onna express very human feelings of coherent resentment, despite their inhumane and bloodthirsty actions. As readers of this course, we often disagree about how much sympathy one might feel for a given murderous, cannibalistic, or otherwise violent character, usually based on a personal belief about whether or not their urami is justified. However, the possibility that a monster is like us, in the sense that one can locate emotional or logical support for one's otherworldly desires, seems to be central to the monster's ability to express urami in a story. Since urami is crucially defined as an emotion arising from the inner state, the ura, of a character, an invitation into the monster's ura is necessary for us to believe in his urami. In this way we are able to appreciate the human motivations that give rise to supernatural violence. Justified or not, the urami monstrosity is a sympathetic monstrosity. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay On the outside, a monster is a literary figure that absolutely resists the reader's sympathetic identification. Even when portrayed as a sentient anthropomorph, his chimerical and inherently frightening body destabilizes readers' perception of him as a thinking being like them. Yamamba, with its grotesque jaws atop its head, and Shuten Doji, with its carnivalesque parody of a human figure, clearly fit the traditional mold of a loathsome quasi-human beast. Yuki-Onna, like many ghosts of folklore around the world, does not have the physical vulgarity of obvious monsters, but her appearance of pale undeath and her ruthless and rapid killing power impose on the reader that, like Yamamba, she is a non-human malignant entity. simulating the shape of a woman. Without quibbling about whether or not a yurei like Yuki-Onna counts alongside male and female Oni as a type of categorically monstrous yokai, we can say that these three supernatural figures serve the same narrative function as monsters; they are creatures that evoke fear because they pose a threat to the protagonist and because they represent what is considered scary in the protagonist's or authors' society. Like many fantasy tropes, the appearance of a monster signifies the raising of the stakes in a narrative: the ensuing confrontation will have extraordinary consequences that go beyond the immediate concerns of the story's plot. In the generic Western hero's journey of patriarchal maturation, the slaying of the dragon signifies not just a single man's escape from danger, but the trial by fire of all men into adulthood and self-determination. In our corpus of urami stories, we have often seen the role of a lone monster expanded to represent the danger believed to be caused by an entire group of people (senile elders in the Oni Mother story, unruly women in Buddhist stories) or the danger posed to entire groups by alien forces (the kidnapping of city women by rural bandits in Shuten Doji, the vulnerability of an entire nation to political machinations in Shiramine). Kawai and Reider grant the Japanese folk monsters they outline a grander symbolic role thansimple representative fear. Their analyzes suggest that Yuki-Onna and Yamamba serve a secondary narrative function beyond serving as bogeymen for traditional Japanese anxieties about two-faced women and geographic outsiders. There are possible interpretations of the two tales that put these particular creatures in a sympathetic light, and thus teach us the inner workings of an urami-centered thought process. Kawai notes that, while Yamamba's metaphorical danger might be drawn from the negative aspects of a universal and mysterious mother figure, the mountain witch's motivation in endangering her victims stems from a palpable and recognizable sense of shame. Quoting the poet Baba, Kawai suggests that instead of fear alone, one might also "feel pity for [the monster], knowing the effort he made to have relationships with ordinary people" and having witnessed this effort betrayed by interference of mortals. men. For Kawai, Yamamba becomes a sympathetic character when he considers the double shame he must feel when his grotesque form is revealed and his privacy is violated. In the version of the tale provided in the Appendix, the monster leaps up to attack the false shaman when he divines its hidden eating habits, shouting: “Grr! You must have been watching me." The revelation that a man knows her shameful form triggers Yamamba's anger and violence, but the monster's dialogue indicates that she feels greater disgrace at the invasive way in which the man has acquired such knowledge. Baba sympathizes with the first of these iniquities, hypothesizing that having his cover blown would be the worst thing that could happen to a creature who has tried so hard to adapt. Kawai, on the other hand, sympathizes with Yamamba's stated cause of grievance. stating that «being looked at is the deepest wound for her». Yamamba's angry reaction aligns with the bitterness of the "woman in 'The Bush Warbler's Home' who painfully had to leave this world because the common man broke his promise." Yamamba reacts with monstrous violence and the female Bush Warbler reacts with a painful demise, but each figure responds to the same injustice of having their otherworldly nature revealed. The dichotomous reactions of the spirit and the monster both indicate urami. The attack of cannibalism and the melancholic escape both arise from negative emotions in the unconscious – symbolized by the non-everyday/non-masculine spaces of the forbidden chamber of the spirit and the monster's kitchen – which are then brought out as resentment towards those who have them inspired, but ultimately do more harm to the person who feels such strong resentment. Comparing these first two sides of the Kawai female archetype reveals a folklorically exaggerated dichotomy between the two most common urami reactions that people must feel ashamed of. You can feel depressed and try to hide from the situation (see manifestations of physical and mental illnesses in the plots of Genji's Kiritsubo, Confessions' Naoki, Zangemono's The Fifth Nun, etc.) or you can feel enraged and face the situation head held high. (as demon women tend to do in Kanawa, Zangemono, Konjaku Monogatari and in the legend of the Dojoji temple). Yamamba's cute monstrosity clarifies the logic of this last reaction. Once we see her urami instigated by a man's lack of respect for her boundaries and his own dashed hopes of fitting in, we can make better sense of her explosive anger. What until then had appeared as an inexplicable, perhaps innate, aspect of Yamamba's monstrosity, when seen as an expression of urami, humanizes both the character and his extreme emotions. ANDInterestingly, Yuki-Onna can be said to react intermediately to Kawai's two examples, as she threatens violence when her secret is revealed, but immediately disappears before she can carry it out. His monstrosity is on full display before he even speaks to the protagonist, so we might guess at other, older causes of his resentment. But, for the purposes of this analysis, we should only consider her transformation from wife to ghost, triggered by the resentment she feels towards her husband who does not keep his promise. Perhaps Yuki-Onna is unable to match Yamamba's ferocity because she fails to fit into the same metaphorical niche of unbridled female fury. This appears to be the case in Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan version of the story, in which the Snow Woman says "But for those children sleeping there, I would kill you right now!" to the man who cheats on her. For all her monstrous, murderous rage, this version of Yuki-Onna is restrained by her maternal role from harming her children's father in front of them. Yamamba, on the other hand, is equally comfortable mothering and killing; she lives mostly uninhibited by expectations of female aversion to violence. The key difference between the two is that, originally from the mountains, Yamamba is a true outsider, while Yuki-Onna, although not of this world, has fully integrated into normative human society. The natural elements can become capriciously dangerous every few winters, but city folk have learned to live with them in a way that still eludes them when dealing with people from the mountains, who Reider points out are often referred to as Oni barbarians. The other main factor Age, which might lead one of the folk figures to be considered more related to maternal duty than self-preservation, can be overlooked in this comparison of versions of folk tales in which both monsters appear as young wives. In the many years that she has played the good wife O-Yuki, Yuki-Onna may have built up resentment against her husband, but until her husband finally betrays the secret she has asked him to indulge (a true indulgence, since she has only his murderous threats). bind him to his word), he cannot express it. We understand her because in her terminal rage she also reveals her tragic attachment to the children she must abandon, now that the secret that binds her to the mortal realm is lost. Before disappearing, she tells her husband: “And now you had better take care of them very, very well; because if they ever have reason to complain about you, I will treat you as you deserve!” In her demise, Yuki-Onna shows how fiercely protective she is of her mortal family, and we see that, like Yamamba, the Snow Woman expresses the deepest aspects of her humanity once Urami brings out her more monstrous behavior . The roots of Yamamba's bitterness (desire to keep her true form hidden, desire to maintain the dignity of not being spied on) the sources of Yuki-Onna's resentment seem rather vague at first. It is never explained in the story why the secret of her identity ties Yuki-Onna to her husband, but one possibility is that it is intended as a symbolic commitment to their unlikely marriage. What might at first seem like an arbitrary threat from a mindless monster might, in retrospect, be seen as a highly intentional test of love. Since we know that urami must have a cause, and Yuki-Onna's threats of revenge suggest that she has a lot of urami, it's not too far off to find the husband guilty of deeper insults to Yuki-Onna's feelings than simply getting the wrong his disguise. . Considering the circumstances in which,, 2010.