Urami and Sympathetic Monstrosity: Examining Japanese Folklore Anonymous College

Early on in his Jungian analysis of Japanese female folk archetypes, Hayao Kawai posits that dangerous supernatural creatures can either represent misunderstood and marginalized people or inscrutably villainous forces of (human) nature, depending on the angle of analysis a reader applies to a tale. His, Akiko Baba’s, and Noriko Reider’s analyses make a case for characters like Yamamba and Yuki-Onna expressing very human feelings of coherent resentment, despite their inhumanly bloodthirsty actions. As readers in this course, we’ve frequently disagreed over how sympathetic one can feel toward any given murderous, cannibalistic, or otherwise violent character, usually based on a personal belief in whether or not their urami is justified. Yet, the possibility of a monster being like us, in the sense that one can locate an emotional or logical underpinning to their otherworldly 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 the inner state, the ura, of a character, some invitation into the monster’s ura is necessary for us to believe in its urami. In this way, we get to appreciate the human motives giving rise to supernatural...