Supernatural Beings Cause Misunderstandings in Society (human), depending on the angle of analysis that a reader applies to a tale. His analyses, those of Akiko Baba and Noriko Reider, argue for characters like Yamamba and Yuki-Onna expressing very human feelings of consistent resentment, despite their inhumanely bloodthirsty actions. As readers of this course, we have often disagreed about how much sympathy one might feel toward a murderous, cannibalistic, or otherwise violent character, usually based on personal belief as to whether or not their urami is justified. Yet the possibility that a monster is like us, in the sense that one can find an emotional or logical basis for one's supernatural desires, seems to be fundamental to the monster's ability to express urami in a story. Since urami is crucially defined as an emotion arising from a character's inner state, ura, some invitation to the monster's ura is necessary for us to believe in its urami. In this way, we can appreciate the human motivations that give rise to supernatural violence. Justified or not, the urami monstrosity is a sympathetic monstrosity. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay On the outside, a monster is a literary figure who absolutely resists the reader's sympathetic identification. Even when he is depicted as a sentient anthropomorph, his chimerical and inherently frightening body destabilizes readers' perception as a thinking being like them. Yamamba, with its grotesque maw above its head, and Shuten Doji, with its carnivalesque parody of a human figure, clearly fit the traditional mold of a loathsome, almost human beast. Yuki-Onna, like many ghosts in folklore around the world, lacks the physical vulgarity of obvious monsters, but her pale undead appearance and ruthlessly rapid killing power impress the reader that, like Yamamba, she is a malignant non-human entity. simulating the shape of a woman. Without splitting hairs as to whether or not a yurei like Yuki-Onna counts alongside male and female Oni as a categorically monstrous type of yokai, we can say that these three supernatural figures serve the same narrative function as monsters; they are creatures that evoke fear because they pose a threat to the protagonist and because they represent what is considered fearful in the protagonist's or authors' society. Like many fantasy tropes, the appearance of a monster means the stakes are raised. in a story: the confrontation that ensues will have extraordinary consequences beyond the immediate concerns of the plot of the story. In the generic Western hero's journey of patriarchal maturation, the slaying of the dragon signifies not just a single man's escape from danger, but the trial by fire of all men toward adulthood and self-determination. In our corpus of Urami stories, we have often seen the role of a lone monster expanded to represent the danger believed to be caused by an entire group of people (the senile elders in the Mother Oni story, unruly women in Buddhist stories) or the danger posed to entire groups by foreign forces (kidnapping of urban women by rural bandits in Shuten Doji, vulnerability of an entire nation topolitical machinations in Shiramine). Kawai and Reider grant the Japanese folk monsters they profile a greater symbolic role than mere representational fear. Their analyzes suggest that Yuki-Onna and Yamamba serve a secondary narrative function beyond their role as bogeymen for traditional Japanese anxieties about two-faced women and geographic outsiders. There are possible interpretations of both tales that cast these distinctive creatures in a sympathetic light and thus teach us the inner workings of an urami-oriented thought process. Kawai notes that while Yamamba's metaphorical danger may be drawn from the negative aspects of a universal and mysterious mother figure, the Mountain Witch's motivation to put her victims in danger comes from a palpable and relevant feeling. of shame. Quoting the poet Baba, Kawai suggests that rather than fear alone, one might also "feel pity for [the monster], knowing the effort she made to relate to ordinary people" and having witnessed of this effort betrayed by the interference of mortals. men. For Kawai, Yamamba becomes a sympathetic character when he considers the double shame she must feel when her grotesque form is revealed and her privacy violated. In the version of the tale provided in the appendix, the monster leaps to attack the false shaman when he senses his hidden eating habits, shouting: “Grr! You must have been watching me. The revelation that a man knows her shameful form triggers Yamamba's anger and violence, but the monster's dialogue indicates that she feels greater shame at the invasive manner in which the man has acquired such knowledge. Baba sympathizes with the first of these inequities, speculating that having his cover blown would be the worst thing that could happen to a creature who has tried so hard to fit in. Kawai, on the other hand, sympathizes with the stated cause of Yamamba's resentment, stating that "being looked at is the deepest wound for her." Kawai associates Yamamba's furious reaction with the bitterness of "the woman from 'The House of the Bush Warbler' who unfortunately had to leave this world because an ordinary man did not keep his promise. Yamamba reacts with monstrous violence and the female Bush Warbler reacts with a painful disappearance, but each character responds to the same injustice of having their supernatural nature revealed. The dichotomous reactions of the spirit and the monster both point to urami. Both the cannibalistic fit and the melancholic escape arise from negative emotions in the unconscious – symbolized by the non-everyday/non-masculine spaces of the spirit's forbidden chamber and the monster's kitchen – which are then expressed as a grudge against the person who inspired them, but ultimately does more harm to the person feeling such resentment. Comparing these first two sides of the Kawai feminine archetype reveals a folklorically exaggerated dichotomy between the two most common urami reactions that people need to shame. One may feel depressed and seek to hide from the situation (see the manifestations of physical and mental illness in the plots of Kiritsubo from Genji, Naoki from Confessions, the Fifth Nun from Zangemono, etc.) or one may feel enraged and face it head on. (as female demons tend to do in Kanawa, Zangemono, Konjaku Monogatari, and in the legend of Dojoji Temple). Yamamba's sympathetic monstrosity clarifies the logic of this latter reaction. Once we see her urami being driven by a man's lack of respect for her boundaries and her own shattered hopes of fitting in, we can better understand her explosive rage. What appeared so faras an inexplicable, perhaps innate, facet of Yamamba's monstrosity, considered an expression of urami, humanizes both the character and his extreme emotions. Interestingly enough, Yuki-Onna can be said to have a middle-of-the-road reaction to both of Kawai's examples, as she threatens violence when her secret is revealed, but she immediately disappears before she can carry it out. Her monstrosity is on full display before she even speaks to the protagonist, so we can guess at other, older causes of her resentment. But, for the purposes of this analysis, we must simply consider her transformation from wife to ghost, triggered by the resentment she feels towards the husband who does not keep his promise. Perhaps Yuki-Onna is not able to match Yamamba's ferocity because she cannot fit into the same metaphorical niche of unbridled female fury. This appears to be the case in Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan version of the story, in which the Snow Woman says, "But for those children sleeping there, I would kill you right now!" » to the man who betrayed her. For all her monstrous, murderous rage, this version of Yuki-Onna is prevented by her maternal role from harming the father of her children in front of them. Yamamba, on the other hand, is comfortable with both mothering and killing; she lives for the most part unapologetically in the face of the expectations of a female aversion to violence. The main difference between the two is that, originating from the mountains, Yamamba is a true outsider, whereas Yuki-Onna, although not of this world, has completely integrated into normative human society. The natural elements can become capriciously dangerous every few winters, but city dwellers have learned to live with them in a way that still eludes them when dealing with mountain people, who, Reider points out, are often seen as barbaric Oni. The other main factor Age, which could lead one of the popular figures to be seen as more committed to the duty of motherhood than to self-preservation, can be ignored in this comparison between the versions of the folk tales in in which the two monsters appear as young wives. Over her many years playing good wife O-Yuki, Yuki-Onna may have built up resentment against her husband, but until her husband finally betrayed the secret she asked him to keep deliver (a real indulgence, since he only has his murderous threats). to bind him to his word), she cannot express it. We sympathize with her because in her terminal anger she also reveals her tragic attachment to the children she must abandon, now that the secret that binds her to the mortal realm is lost. Before disappearing, she said to the husband: “And now you had better take very, very good care of them; because if they ever have reason to complain about you, I will treat you as you deserve! In her disappearance, Yuki-Onna shows how fiercely protective she is of her mortal family, and we see that like Yamamba, the Snow Woman expresses the deepest aspects of her humanity once Urami brings out her behavior the most monstrous. roots of Yamamba's bitterness (desire to keep her true form hidden, desire to maintain the dignity of not being spied on), the sources of Yuki-Onna's resentment seem at first somewhat vague. It is never explained in the story why the secret of her identity binds Yuki-Onna to her husband, but it is possible that it is meant to serve as a symbolic commitment to their unlikely marriage. What might at first seem like an arbitrary threat from a mindless monster might, in retrospect, be,, 2010.

Essay / Supernatural Beings Cause Misunderstandings in Society (human), depending on the angle of analysis that a reader applies to a tale. His analyses, those of Akiko Baba and Noriko Reider, argue for characters like Yamamba and Yuki-Onna expressing very human feelings of consistent resentment, despite their inhumanely bloodthirsty actions. As readers of this course, we have often disagreed about how much sympathy one might feel toward a murderous, cannibalistic, or otherwise violent character, usually based on personal belief as to whether or not their urami is justified. Yet the possibility that a monster is like us, in the sense that one can find an emotional or logical basis for one's supernatural desires, seems to be fundamental to the monster's ability to express urami in a story. Since urami is crucially defined as an emotion arising from a character's inner state, ura, some invitation to the monster's ura is necessary for us to believe in its urami. In this way, we can appreciate the human motivations that give rise to supernatural violence. Justified or not, the urami monstrosity is a sympathetic monstrosity. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay On the outside, a monster is a literary figure who absolutely resists the reader's sympathetic identification. Even when he is depicted as a sentient anthropomorph, his chimerical and inherently frightening body destabilizes readers' perception as a thinking being like them. Yamamba, with its grotesque maw above its head, and Shuten Doji, with its carnivalesque parody of a human figure, clearly fit the traditional mold of a loathsome, almost human beast. Yuki-Onna, like many ghosts in folklore around the world, lacks the physical vulgarity of obvious monsters, but her pale undead appearance and ruthlessly rapid killing power impress the reader that, like Yamamba, she is a malignant non-human entity. simulating the shape of a woman. Without splitting hairs as to whether or not a yurei like Yuki-Onna counts alongside male and female Oni as a categorically monstrous type of yokai, we can say that these three supernatural figures serve the same narrative function as monsters; they are creatures that evoke fear because they pose a threat to the protagonist and because they represent what is considered fearful in the protagonist's or authors' society. Like many fantasy tropes, the appearance of a monster means the stakes are raised. in a story: the confrontation that ensues will have extraordinary consequences beyond the immediate concerns of the plot of the story. In the generic Western hero's journey of patriarchal maturation, the slaying of the dragon signifies not just a single man's escape from danger, but the trial by fire of all men toward adulthood and self-determination. In our corpus of Urami stories, we have often seen the role of a lone monster expanded to represent the danger believed to be caused by an entire group of people (the senile elders in the Mother Oni story, unruly women in Buddhist stories) or the danger posed to entire groups by foreign forces (kidnapping of urban women by rural bandits in Shuten Doji, vulnerability of an entire nation topolitical machinations in Shiramine). Kawai and Reider grant the Japanese folk monsters they profile a greater symbolic role than mere representational fear. Their analyzes suggest that Yuki-Onna and Yamamba serve a secondary narrative function beyond their role as bogeymen for traditional Japanese anxieties about two-faced women and geographic outsiders. There are possible interpretations of both tales that cast these distinctive creatures in a sympathetic light and thus teach us the inner workings of an urami-oriented thought process. Kawai notes that while Yamamba's metaphorical danger may be drawn from the negative aspects of a universal and mysterious mother figure, the Mountain Witch's motivation to put her victims in danger comes from a palpable and relevant feeling. of shame. Quoting the poet Baba, Kawai suggests that rather than fear alone, one might also "feel pity for [the monster], knowing the effort she made to relate to ordinary people" and having witnessed of this effort betrayed by the interference of mortals. men. For Kawai, Yamamba becomes a sympathetic character when he considers the double shame she must feel when her grotesque form is revealed and her privacy violated. In the version of the tale provided in the appendix, the monster leaps to attack the false shaman when he senses his hidden eating habits, shouting: “Grr! You must have been watching me. The revelation that a man knows her shameful form triggers Yamamba's anger and violence, but the monster's dialogue indicates that she feels greater shame at the invasive manner in which the man has acquired such knowledge. Baba sympathizes with the first of these inequities, speculating that having his cover blown would be the worst thing that could happen to a creature who has tried so hard to fit in. Kawai, on the other hand, sympathizes with the stated cause of Yamamba's resentment, stating that "being looked at is the deepest wound for her." Kawai associates Yamamba's furious reaction with the bitterness of "the woman from 'The House of the Bush Warbler' who unfortunately had to leave this world because an ordinary man did not keep his promise. Yamamba reacts with monstrous violence and the female Bush Warbler reacts with a painful disappearance, but each character responds to the same injustice of having their supernatural nature revealed. The dichotomous reactions of the spirit and the monster both point to urami. Both the cannibalistic fit and the melancholic escape arise from negative emotions in the unconscious – symbolized by the non-everyday/non-masculine spaces of the spirit's forbidden chamber and the monster's kitchen – which are then expressed as a grudge against the person who inspired them, but ultimately does more harm to the person feeling such resentment. Comparing these first two sides of the Kawai feminine archetype reveals a folklorically exaggerated dichotomy between the two most common urami reactions that people need to shame. One may feel depressed and seek to hide from the situation (see the manifestations of physical and mental illness in the plots of Kiritsubo from Genji, Naoki from Confessions, the Fifth Nun from Zangemono, etc.) or one may feel enraged and face it head on. (as female demons tend to do in Kanawa, Zangemono, Konjaku Monogatari, and in the legend of Dojoji Temple). Yamamba's sympathetic monstrosity clarifies the logic of this latter reaction. Once we see her urami being driven by a man's lack of respect for her boundaries and her own shattered hopes of fitting in, we can better understand her explosive rage. What appeared so faras an inexplicable, perhaps innate, facet of Yamamba's monstrosity, considered an expression of urami, humanizes both the character and his extreme emotions. Interestingly enough, Yuki-Onna can be said to have a middle-of-the-road reaction to both of Kawai's examples, as she threatens violence when her secret is revealed, but she immediately disappears before she can carry it out. Her monstrosity is on full display before she even speaks to the protagonist, so we can guess at other, older causes of her resentment. But, for the purposes of this analysis, we must simply consider her transformation from wife to ghost, triggered by the resentment she feels towards the husband who does not keep his promise. Perhaps Yuki-Onna is not able to match Yamamba's ferocity because she cannot fit into the same metaphorical niche of unbridled female fury. This appears to be the case in Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan version of the story, in which the Snow Woman says, "But for those children sleeping there, I would kill you right now!" » to the man who betrayed her. For all her monstrous, murderous rage, this version of Yuki-Onna is prevented by her maternal role from harming the father of her children in front of them. Yamamba, on the other hand, is comfortable with both mothering and killing; she lives for the most part unapologetically in the face of the expectations of a female aversion to violence. The main difference between the two is that, originating from the mountains, Yamamba is a true outsider, whereas Yuki-Onna, although not of this world, has completely integrated into normative human society. The natural elements can become capriciously dangerous every few winters, but city dwellers have learned to live with them in a way that still eludes them when dealing with mountain people, who, Reider points out, are often seen as barbaric Oni. The other main factor Age, which could lead one of the popular figures to be seen as more committed to the duty of motherhood than to self-preservation, can be ignored in this comparison between the versions of the folk tales in in which the two monsters appear as young wives. Over her many years playing good wife O-Yuki, Yuki-Onna may have built up resentment against her husband, but until her husband finally betrayed the secret she asked him to keep deliver (a real indulgence, since he only has his murderous threats). to bind him to his word), she cannot express it. We sympathize with her because in her terminal anger she also reveals her tragic attachment to the children she must abandon, now that the secret that binds her to the mortal realm is lost. Before disappearing, she said to the husband: “And now you had better take very, very good care of them; because if they ever have reason to complain about you, I will treat you as you deserve! In her disappearance, Yuki-Onna shows how fiercely protective she is of her mortal family, and we see that like Yamamba, the Snow Woman expresses the deepest aspects of her humanity once Urami brings out her behavior the most monstrous. roots of Yamamba's bitterness (desire to keep her true form hidden, desire to maintain the dignity of not being spied on), the sources of Yuki-Onna's resentment seem at first somewhat vague. It is never explained in the story why the secret of her identity binds Yuki-Onna to her husband, but it is possible that it is meant to serve as a symbolic commitment to their unlikely marriage. What might at first seem like an arbitrary threat from a mindless monster might, in retrospect, be,, 2010.

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