The Island of Women (Japanese folktale)

Author: Traditional

Time Period: 1501 CE–1700 CE

Country or Culture: Japan

Genre: Folktale

PLOT SUMMARY

The chieftain of the town of Iwanai sets sail with his two sons one day, hoping to hunt down enough sea lions to provide a feast for their people. Though they manage to spear a sea lion, a violent storm then descends upon them, forcing the chieftain to cut the rope attached to the thrashing animal and ride out the waves.

In a short while, the man and his sons come to a gorgeous island. As they approach the shore, a parade of beautiful women comes to meet them. They all carry another, even more beautiful woman, hoisting her above their heads in an ornate chair. This woman is left at the shore to greet the men as her companions return up the hillside. She explains that this island is a land of women, and as such, there are no men there. There is also, she says, something else unusual about the island, which she will not explain. Because of this additional peculiarity, she will allow the men to stay in her house for the remainder of the spring and the summer. When the autumn passes, the men will be made husbands to the women, and when the next spring arrives, they will be sent back home.

The men carry the female chieftain to her home, where she puts them in a fine room surrounded by golden netting. While the men reside in the female chieftain’s home, women from all over the hills come to look upon them. Months pass in this manner, until the leaves of the trees begin to change for autumn. When this occurs, the female chieftain comes to take the male chieftain as her husband, explaining that his sons will go to two other women. The men spend the winter as husbands, lying with the women and living among them.

When the spring at last comes, the female chieftain takes her husband aside. She explains to him that the women of this island, unlike the women of his home, grow teeth in their vaginas every year. These teeth appear with the first growth of spring and fall out in the autumn as the leaves change. Because this prevents them from marrying, the women take the wind as their husband, turning their backs to it when it blows and thus becoming pregnant. The girls are raised among them and the boys are killed when they reach the age of men. Because of all of this, she says, she will send the chieftain and his sons home.

On the last night, however, the female chieftain is overcome with emotion. Knowing she will miss her husband, she asks that he lie with her one last time. The male chieftain, fearing for his safety, crawls into bed with her. Instead of using his body, however, he takes the sheath of his sword and inserts it into the female chieftain to make love with her. The next day, he and his sons sail back to their home, where their wives have been mourning as widows. When they tell the story of the island of women, the male chieftain shows the people his scabbard, the markings of the teeth still upon it.

SIGNIFICANCE

Although the story of an island of women who possess teeth-filled vaginas might seem strange to some modern readers, it is in fact a common motif across world mythology, appearing in a large number of traditions across diverse regions. This particular version comes from the Ainu people, an ethnic group that is indigenous to Japan and Russia, and was allegedly adapted from an earlier Japanese tale. The culture of the Ainu seems to have emerged in the late twelfth century CE as an outgrowth of the earlier Satsumon culture. The story of the island of women was recorded in the late nineteenth century by a British academic named Basil Hall Chamberlain. Unsurprisingly, very similar versions of the myth exist in Japanese culture as well.

Across cultures, the stories of women with teeth in their vaginas are referred to as vagina dentata (Latin for “toothed vagina”) stories. As with most vagina dentata myths, the Ainu tale is in many ways a reflection of male anxieties and desires. The island of women, a land in which the chieftain and his sons are the only men, is described as a sort of paradise. The women are all gorgeous and all desire the company of the men, having been loved only by the wind for generations, and the land itself is fertile and pleasing. As the only male figures in this land, the men are living a sort of prolonged sexual fantasy, the women gathering to gaze on them while they remain the companions of the most powerful figures in the society. This fantasy, however, is revealed to have a nightmarish component when the female chieftain tells the men of the women’s biological peculiarity. Instead of a sexual paradise, the island becomes a land of physical violence. Realizing the fantasy of union with the women will result in a gruesome dismemberment in which the primary sign of their masculinity will be literally ripped away from them. For a man who lives in a position of power within his own society—the main hunter and political leader of his people—the power held by the female chieftain on her island of women is both eroticized and terrifying, the physical threat of her female body representing a metaphorical threat to his role of masculine power. This is further heightened by the fact that he uses his scabbard to lie with the female chieftain, the scabbard being a symbol of masculinity, violence, and leadership that the woman is quickly and easily able to damage.

In the end, the man and his sons return to their island. There, their wives wait in pious respect, cloaked in mourning clothes that signal their devotion to and respect for their male partners. The threat of the island of women is avoided, and the men are still able to function physically and as political leaders. It is unsurprising that the men escape the island both unharmed and having experienced the sexual pleasures the women offer, especially as the tale is told from the perspective of a male-dominated society. The tale of the island of women, like vagina dentata stories in many societies, is primarily an expression of anxiety. As in so many patriarchal cultures, the men’s fear is ultimately not a fear of castration or displacement but rather a fear of powerful women, figures who lead their own societies and control their own bodies, upsetting the dominance of men in the process.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chamberlain, Basil Hall. Aino Folk-Tales. London: Folk-Lore Soc., 1888. Print.

Ishida Eiichirō. “The Island of Women.” Japan Quarterly 4.4 (1957): 454–60. Print.

Macé, François. “Human Rhythm and Divine Rhythm in Ainu Epics.” Diogenes 46.1 (1998): 31–42. Print.

Moerman, D. Max. “Demonology and Eroticism: Islands of Women in the Japanese Buddhist Imagination.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 36.2 (2009): 351–80. Print.

Refsing, Kirsten, ed. Early European Writing on Ainu Culture: Religion and Folklore. 5 vols. London: Routledge, 2002. Print.