Samuto-no-Baba (Iwate)

Samuto-no-Baba is an old woman of the kamikakushi (spirit-spiriting-away) tradition transmitted in Matsuzaki-cho, Tono, Iwate. She is said to have vanished from beneath a pear tree as a young girl, and to return to her family in old age, but only on days of high wind. Yanagita Kunio's Tono Monogatari, tale 8, records the figure briefly, and the case stands as a representative crystallization of the kamikakushi and the return-visit motif. The canonical narrative places the daughter of a household in Samuto village, who disappears just before her wedding; over thirty years later, on a stormy windy night, she returns as an old woman, exchanges a few words with the family, and vanishes again. Thereafter, on days of high wind, the household is said to remark that today is a day when Samuto-no-Baba may come, the memory of the kamikakushi binding to the ordinary weather. Yanagita Kunio's Tono Monogatari (Meiji 43, 1910) tale 8 is the principal early text and the most famous textual citation. The text records the figure as Yanagita took down Sasaki Kizen's Tono oral tradition. Later Tono folklore studies, Murakami Kenji's Nihon Yokai Daijiten (Kadokawa, 2005), and the Nichibunken Strange Phenomena and Yokai Folklore Database carry the case forward. The Tono basin holds several kamikakushi-and-return cases; only Samuto-no-Baba has the name as proper. Adjacent yokai of the Tohoku mountains include the yama-no-kami and yamamba traditions, but Samuto-no-Baba is identified by the conjunction of the proper name, the place-name, and the wind.