Ameonna

Where she walks, it rains.

Sekien painted her in 1781 standing out in the downpour with her hair soaked flat and her tongue out, licking the rainwater off her own hand — not sheltering, not miserable, feeding. It's a genuinely feral image and it's the one that fixed her.

The rain woman has had three completely different lives since then, and they don't fit together at all, which is what makes her worth reading properly.

She started as a dirty joke

Sekien's caption doesn't point at folk belief. It points at Chinese poetry — specifically the goddess of Mount Wu, who in a famous old fragment appears to a king in a dream and describes herself as "a cloud in the morning and rain in the evening."

That phrase had been a polite euphemism for sex for about a thousand years by the time Sekien used it. Clouds and rain, in classical Chinese and Japanese literature, means a night together.

So the ameonna arrives in the catalog as an educated wink — part weather spirit, part pleasure-quarter satire, a creature made out of a euphemism. Sekien's readers would have caught it immediately.

Then it got much darker

Underneath the literary joke there is a folk layer that has nothing funny in it at all, and it deserves to be told carefully.

There was a belief that women whose newborn children were spirited away on rainy nights — taken, vanished, the phenomenon the Japanese call kamikakushi — became rain women themselves. They wander in the wet with a large sack, and they appear to children.

Read against the rest of the tradition, that puts her in the same family as the ubume, the woman who died in childbirth and still stands at the crossing asking someone to hold her baby. It's the same grief, given different weather. The rain isn't a power here. It's what mourning that never ends looks like from outside.

And then people prayed to her

The third layer flips the whole thing over.

In a drought, a woman who brings rain wherever she goes is not a curse. She's the answer. So the same figure gets prayed to — sought out, welcomed, asked for exactly the thing that makes her feared in a wet year.

That's the most honest lesson in Japanese weather folklore, and it's true of a lot of these creatures: whether a spirit is a blessing or a disaster is usually decided by what you happen to be growing.

She's still around

Her name survived all three layers and landed somewhere very ordinary.

An ameonna — or ameotoko, a rain man — is modern everyday Japanese for the friend who ruins the weather. The one whose presence guarantees the picnic gets rained out, who books the beach holiday that turns into a week of storms. People say it constantly, affectionately, in complete ignorance of the fact that the word runs back through a grieving mother with a sack to a Chinese goddess with a double meaning.