Sunakake-baba

Sunakake-baba is a yokai in the form of an old woman, unseen, who scatters sand from above in shrine groves and lonely lanes. The figure shows no form, only sand pouring down from a treetop or wall to startle passers-by. The figure is told as a regional yokai of Settsu and Yamato Provinces (now Hyogo and Nara), recorded in the gazetteers of the early-modern and modern periods. The canonical narrative places the figure on the approach to a shrine at dusk or night, in a bamboo grove, or in a quiet by-road, where sand pours down from above although no form is seen. Cognate cases are recorded in Nishinomiya, Hyogo, and in the Yamanobe and Katsuragi regions of Nara, and in some cases the figure is told as a warning to those who trespass at the boundary of a sacred grove. The doings are read by some as those of an arboreal tanuki or fox, and by others as those of a guardian-presence at the shrine boundary. Yanagita Kunio's Yokai Dangi (1956) collects regional yokai reports including sunakake-baba. Cognate cases are recorded in gazetteers of Hyogo and folklore notes of Nara, and Murakami Kenji's Nihon Yokai Daijiten (Kadokawa, 2005) systematizes the figure. The Nichibunken Strange Phenomena and Yokai Folklore Database compiles cases. Adjacent sand-scattering yokai include sunamaki-danuki and sunamaki-gitsune, told as the doings of a tanuki or fox in a treetop, and the figure is interchangeable with them in some districts. Regional names include "sunamaki" in Kyoto and Osaka and "sunakake-baba" in Nara. The motif of a shrine-grove old woman as guardian-of-the-boundary shares lineage with the Tokushima konaki-jiji.