Long before she became associated with fear in some later retellings, the Yamauba belonged to a much older and more ambivalent tradition in Japanese folklore, one that never fully resolved whether the solitary woman of the mountains was to be feared or revered. She appears across centuries of storytelling as many things at once: a guardian of travellers, a wet-nurse to abandoned children, a weaver, a prophet, a keeper of wisdom the village below had long since forgotten. What unites these tellings is not malice but distance, a woman who has lived so long outside the boundaries of household and community that she has taken on something of the mountain's own mystery. 

It is worth remembering that these stories took shape in a society that offered women little formal power or voice of their own, and the Yamauba can be read as much as a projection of that unease as any judgement upon women themselves, an embodiment of what a woman might become once free of husband, household and social role. She is less a cautionary figure than a record of quiet awe, the folkloric imagination's uneasy respect for age, solitude and independence it could not otherwise explain.

Yoca Muta's Yamauba departs gently from this inherited iconography. Where tradition places her deep within the forest or high in the mountains, here she surfaces at the meeting point of land and sea, her face emerging through a tangle of seaweed and coral-like growth, the blue peaks of her old domain still visible behind her, as though the mountain has not been left behind so much as folded into memory alongside the water. Her gold-rimmed eyes hold something tender rather than fearsome, a figure caught mid-emergence, not menace. Titled Breath of Life, the piece resists any reading of loss or submersion, insisting instead on arrival, on the quiet instant before the first breath, when old certainties dissolve into something gentler and more elemental.

This meeting of mountain and sea is not incidental to Muta's own geography. She lives and works in Ishikawa, on the Sea of Japan coast, in the shadow of the Hakusan range, one of Japan's three sacred mountains, whose peaks rise within sight of the water lapping the prefecture's edge. That proximity, mountain folklore pressing gently against a coastal horizon, feels woven into the piece's very structure, as though the Yamauba has migrated from her old, landlocked myth into the particular, doubled landscape the artist calls home.

Howard Clegg

August 2026