Ubume

Ubume is the ghost of a woman who died in childbirth, depicted in a blood-stained underskirt and carrying an infant. The canonical narrative places her at a bridgehead, riverside, or crossroads at night, asking a passer-by to hold the baby; the child grows heavy in the bearer's arms but the one who endures to dawn is granted prodigious strength, treasure, or martial fame. The type is dense in the river-flats and bridges of Yamashiro (Kyoto) and Omi (Shiga). Later traditions link the figure to the Watanabe-no-Tsuna lineage of warrior strength legends. Toriyama Sekien's Gazu Hyakki Yagyo, "in" volume (Anei 5, 1776), gives the canonical figure. The name and Chinese characters trace to the guhuoniao of Li Shizhen's Bencao Gangmu, where the soul of a woman dead in childbirth becomes a bird; Japan layers a human-form tradition on top of the imported bird form, attested in the Konjaku Monogatari-shu volume 27, the Kokon Chomonju, and early-modern collections such as Shokoku Hyaku-monogatari and Kokon Hyaku-monogatari Hyoban. The figure is collated in Murakami Kenji's Nihon Yokai Daijiten (Kadokawa, 2005) and the Nichibunken database.