The Woman in the Snow
Japan · Folk tradition, recorded nineteenth and early twentieth century
They had been woodcutters of Musashi, in the years when the river road ran straight and the forests came nearly to the edge of Edo. The older was named Mosaku. The younger, his apprentice, was named Minokichi, and was eighteen. The records say they cut wood together five miles from their village, and that on the evening in question they were returning along the road that crossed the river when the storm came down.
The storm closed the river.
The ferryman had taken his boat to the far shore and would not return for it. The two men sheltered in the ferryman’s hut, which had no fire and no window. They drew their cloaks across themselves and slept upon the boards while the wind threw the snow against the roof. Mosaku slept. Minokichi did not. When the door opened, he was awake to see it.
A woman entered. She was dressed entirely in white. The records, without exception, insist on this. The cloth was the cloth of a kimono, but it was the white that was strange. It was not bridal. It was not mourning. It was the white of the snow that had come in with her. The records say her hair was the colour of the storm, and her face was the face of someone who had not breathed in a long time, and who now breathed only out.
She bent over Mosaku.
She did not touch him. The records say she put her face very close to his face, and she breathed upon him. The breath was visible. Hearn called it a bright white smoke. The other witnesses, in interviews recorded across the colder provinces, said the same thing in their own words. The breath was cold beyond the cold of the room. Mosaku did not wake. By morning his face was the face of a man frozen in sleep, and the cloth across his chest had stiffened where the breath had passed.
She turned to Minokichi.
She bent close as she had bent close to Mosaku. The records say she did not breathe upon him. She regarded him. The accounts do not describe the regarding at length, but they preserve what she said. She said she would have killed him. She said that he was very young, and that she had decided, in looking, she would not. She said he was to tell no one of what he had seen, by any account, by any speech, by any written record, and that if he did, she would know, and she would come back, and the second visit would not be a regarding.
She left. The door closed. The storm went on.
On her appearance
The accounts agree on three things. The whiteness was complete. The cloth, the skin, the breath, the eyes pale enough to hold no obvious colour. The figure was tall. The records taken from villagers in the colder provinces describe her as taller than the doorways of the houses she entered, as if the body had not been measured for the world it walked into. The third was the silence of her movement. She did not displace the snow. She did not leave a footprint. Where she had stood, the boards of the hut were not damp.
She was named Yuki-onna in the texts that came later. The older villages who had encountered her, in the oral material, had not always given her a name. They had given her a season.
On the silence she required
What came after was kept by Hearn, who had it from the wife of a man named Minokichi, in the village of Hosokawa, in the year 1893. The old man was by then a husband and a father. He had married a woman he met on the road from Yedo, in the year after the night in the ferryman’s hut. She was very pale, and very young, and was named O-Yuki, and was on her way, she said, to enter service in the city. She did not enter service. She married him.
She bore him ten children. The records, here, are very particular. They were handsome children. They were healthy children. The wife did not age with them. The neighbours noticed and did not say. The husband noticed and said only, on the night the lamp guttered and her face caught the cold light, that she put him in mind, very briefly, of something he had once seen.
He told her.
He told her in the easy voice of a man who had decided the figure in the storm had not been real, that the years had softened the night, and that the children at the table had earned, by their presence, the right to know how their father had come into his wife. The records say she did not move at first. They say she rose from the table. They say she looked at him and reminded him, in the same voice he had heard at eighteen, of what she had said.
The records say she did not kill him. They say only that the children were not to be harmed, that he was to tend them, and that what had stayed with him for forty years had now gone out into the snow it had come in from, and that the door, when she had passed through it, had not closed.
The archive holds no position on whether she had been his wife. The archive observes only that the record was kept, that she had said, and the record had been broken, and that the snow, in the village of Hosokawa, was thick that winter and thicker the next, and the children, all ten of them, lived to be old.
- Hearn, Lafcadio. Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. Boston, 1904. The English literary canon for the Yuki-Onna narrative, with the encounter at the ferryman's hut and the subsequent marriage to O-Yuki.
- Davis, F. Hadland. Myths & Legends of Japan. London, 1912. Chapter XI: 'Yuki-Onna, the Lady of the Snow.' A collateral early-twentieth-century treatment of the snow-woman tradition, drawn from Japanese sources independent of Hearn.