Oshiroibabā

Two distinct strands appear in the sources. In Edo-period yōkai compendia (Konjaku Hyakki Shūi), Toriyama Sekien depicts an oshiroibabā and comments that she may be an attendant of a goddess of red and white oshiroi (Shifunsenjo), though Sekien's remark is ambiguous and the connection to local folklore is not established. Separately, a Hase-dera temple legend (Muromachi-period context) tells of an old woman with a powdered face who appears to painter monks during a time of scarcity; she provides rice that multiplies and is later enshrined at the temple, where a statue of the old woman was ritually powdered annually until around the Meiji era.

Commonly described as an elderly, very bent woman whose face is covered so thickly and messily with oshiroi that looking at her is said to be terrifying. Toriyama Sekien's Konjaku Hyakki Shūi image shows her wearing a large broken umbrella on her head, holding a walking stick in her right hand and a tokkuri (sake flask) in her left. Local accounts (Totsukawa river tradition) add that she may drag a mirror and make a jingling sound as she appears. Folklorists note parallels in imagery to mountain old-woman figures, but such identifications are treated as uncertain.

Sources emphasize striking visual presence and varied roles across accounts rather than explicit supernatural powers. In regional descriptions she appears at particular places and can terrify onlookers by her powdered face; Sekien's commentary places her within a ritual/cosmetic imagery network. The Hase-dera legend attributes a miraculous, beneficent episode to a powdered-old-woman figure (multiplying rice to feed painter monks) and the subsequent enshrinement of an image, indicating that in some localized tradition she can act as a protective or miraculous benefactor. Claims that she begs for oshiroi or seeks sake are suggested by comparisons to mountain-witch motifs but are not uniformly documented.