Oshiroibaba

Sekien's 1784 plate shows a heavily stooped old woman under a large torn umbrella, with a walking stick in one hand and a sake bottle in the other.

Her name means "face-powder hag."

And she's a useful case, because you can peel this one apart layer by layer, and each layer has a name attached to it.

The genuine bit

There's a tradition from Nara — Yoshino — and it's small and it's excellent.

She appears dragging a mirror behind her, which jingles as it scrapes along the ground.

That's it. That's the whole apparition.

An old woman, at dusk, on stone, dragging a mirror she is not looking into — and the sound arrives before she does.

I'd take that over most of the monsters in this collection. You hear a small metallic scraping and jingling coming up the path, and it goes on for a while before there's anything to see, and what there is to see is somebody's grandmother pulling a mirror along behind her.

Layer one: Sekien's caption

Sekien attached a job title to her, tentatively — the phrasing floats it rather than asserts it.

She might be an attendant serving the deity of face-powder — a cosmetics-goddess's field agent.

Which is a lovely conceit, and scholars have looked for the Nara folklore that would support it, and there isn't any.

The goddess is very probably one of Sekien's Chinese imports — he did this constantly, reaching into continental references to give a Japanese picture a pedigree.

Layer two: Fujisawa's snow romance

Morihiko Fujisawa placed her in Noto, and recast her as a yuki-onna cousin — a snow-woman relative who appears on snowy evenings to buy sake.

Researchers went looking for the local records.

There are none. The assessment is that this was Fujisawa's creative extrapolation.

And that name should ring a bell, because this is the second confirmed Fujisawa insertion in this collection.

He's the man whose 1929 caption invented the idea that the gourd-headed old man in the Edo catalogues was the supreme commander of all yokai — a claim with no basis whatsoever that is now known by roughly a hundred million people and has been animated for television.

Two entries. Two fabrications. Both plausible, both attractive, both stuck.

He wasn't a hoaxer. He was a populariser filling silences — and the silences in this tradition are enormous, because so many of these creatures are pictures without captions. Someone looking at a mute plate and writing down what it probably means is doing something useful right up until the guess gets quoted as a source.

Which makes her a specimen

Stack the layers:

A genuine local ghost — the woman with the dragged mirror in Yoshino.

Sekien's goddess-attendant conceit, 1784, probably Chinese.

Fujisawa's snow-woman romance, twentieth century, no basis.

Three layers, each with a byline, sitting on top of maybe one real thing.

That's the whole authenticity problem of Japanese folklore in a single small entry, and it's why she's worth keeping even though the famous version is invented.

And the comparative frame is genuinely interesting

Specialists group her with the *yamahime — the mountain women — who come down to the edge of the village to beg for cosmetics or buy alcohol.*

Sit with that as a category.

There's a whole class of Japanese supernatural women who live in the wild, and what they want from human settlement is not food, not shelter, not blood.

Face powder and drink.

The mountain's women coming down for the village's vanities. Wildness, at the boundary, wanting to buy civilization's face.

That's a much better idea than a snow romance, and it was there the whole time.

If I were drawing her, I'd skip the powder entirely and do the Yoshino version: the path, the dusk, the stooped figure, and the mirror dragging behind on the stones.