Yamato Sunakake-baba Legend

The Yamato sunakake-baba (sunakake-bbaa) legend tells of a yokai of the southern Yamato basin around Yamatokoriyama who, at village borders and in forests, suddenly drops sand on those walking the night roads. The figure's form is unseen; only the sound remains. Looking up, one finds nothing in the branches; the sand falls on as if the figure follows the traveller home. Variants attribute the deed to a fox, tanuki or mujina, or to an old-woman yokai dropping sand from above. In Yamatokoriyama the appearance is set in the groves of shrines and the edges of bamboo thickets, on the routes of night pilgrimages and night work, as a village-boundary yokai. The structure has three parts: the falling sand and the sense of a presence on a night road; failure of visual confirmation when one looks up; and continuation to one's house and the crossing of the boundary. The cycle is an acoustic and tactile yokai, akin to okuri-inu and okuri-chochin in the lineage of night-walk yokai that voice the fear of the night through sound. The naming of the figure as 'bbaa' (granny) suggests continuity with yamauba and oni-baba tales. The setting includes the old-highway groves and bamboo thickets of Yamatokoriyama, Tenri and Kashihara in southern Yamato basin (Nara). Similarly named tales are also distributed at village borders around Kyoto, forming a group of boundary yokai shared by the highways of the Kinki region. Sources include Yanagita Kunio's Yokai Dangi and Toriyama Sekien's Gazu Hyakki Tsurezure-Bukuro (1784), where the 'sunakake-baba' entry is genealogically anchored. The folklore volume of the Nara prefectural history and the folklore section of the Yamatokoriyama city history record local variants. The figure is a regional oral tradition not in the Kojiki, Nihon Shoki or Engishiki.