Yuki-onna (snow woman)
Yuki-onna, the snow woman, is a pale woman who comes with the snow and kills with her cold. In Lafcadio Hearn’s story of 1904 she spares a young woodcutter, later marries him, and vanishes when he breaks his promise of silence.
Meaning
Yuki means snow and onna woman. Hearn’s story, in Kwaidan (1904), was told to him by a farmer of Chōfu, in Musashi province, as a legend of his native village, and he did not know whether it had ever been written down in Japanese; the belief it records, he wrote, used to exist in most parts of Japan in many curious forms. Henri Joly (1908) describes the snow woman as taller than the trees, with a white, weird face, rising at night with a shower of snow. Chamberlain (1905) lists the “White Woman” who wanders in the snow among the bogies Japanese children feared.
Origin and history
In Hearn’s telling, two woodcutters, old Mosaku and his apprentice Minokichi, aged eighteen, shelter from a snowstorm in a ferryman’s hut. Minokichi wakes to see a woman all in white bending over Mosaku and blowing her breath on him, a breath like bright white smoke. She bends over the boy, pities him because he is so young, and warns him that if he ever tells anyone, even his mother, she will know and kill him. Mosaku is found frozen dead. The next winter Minokichi meets a girl called O-Yuki (“snow”), marries her, and she bears him ten children without growing older. Years later he tells her about the white woman. O-Yuki shrieks that it was she, spares him only for the children’s sake, and melts into a bright white mist that goes up through the smoke-hole; she is never seen again.
The snow woman at Yabu shrine
Joly connects her with a winter festival. She can sometimes be seen, he writes, by the pilgrims to the Yabu shrine at Yabumura, dedicated to Kaze no Kami, the god of colds and coughs, who come in the coldest part of the year, the first week of February, in straw sandals and loincloths, the men carrying a gohei and a naked sword and the women a mirror. Joly gives Hearn as his source for it.
One farmer’s legend and the older record
The marriage and the broken promise come from the village legend Hearn heard in Chōfu, as he says himself. The older descriptions in Joly and Chamberlain give only the snow woman, white and tall, who rises with the snow at night.
Read next
- Next in Yōkai and creatures of Japanese folkloreRokurokubi (long-necked woman)The rokurokubi is a yōkai in human form, usually a woman, whose neck stretches to great lengths. A related creature, the nukekubi, has a head that leaves its body after dark.
- The same shape in Catholic symbolsImmaculate Heart of MaryA heart pierced by a sword: the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the Catholic devotion to the love and sorrows of the Virgin Mary.
See also
Kitsune (fox), Tanuki (raccoon dog), Bakeneko and nekomata (cat yōkai), Jorōgumo (spider woman), Tengu, Kappa.
Sources
- Lafcadio Hearn, Kwaidan (1904), Lafcadio Hearn, Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904 (Project Gutenberg ebook 1210), Project Gutenberg, introduction; “Yuki-Onna”
- Henri L. Joly, Legend in Japanese Art (1908), Henri L. Joly, Legend in Japanese Art: A Description of Historical Episodes, Legendary Characters, Folk-lore, Myths, Religious Symbolism Illustrated in the Arts of Old Japan, London: John Lane, 1908, John Lane (Internet Archive, University of Toronto copy), entry 1111, Yuki Onna; “Bakemono”, p. 16
- Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese (1905), Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan, fifth edition, London: John Murray, 1905, John Murray (Internet Archive, University of Toronto copy), “Supernatural Creatures”, p. 443
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves or lines.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
Added .