What is yuki-onna?
Yuki-onna is a yokai said to appear on snowy nights or in blizzards as a beautiful woman in a white kimono. With skin so pale it seems transparent, she freezes people to death with her cold breath or leads them astray in the snow. Legends of her are told in many places, especially in the snowy Tohoku and Hokuriku regions.
Lafcadio Hearn’s “Yuki-Onna”
The best-known yuki-onna story is “Yuki-Onna” in Kwaidan (1904) by Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo). On a night of fierce snow, a young man named Minokichi meets a snow woman in a mountain hut. She spares him, warning that he will die if he ever tells anyone about that night. Later Minokichi marries a beautiful young woman named O-Yuki and they have children, but one night he lets slip the story. O-Yuki reveals that she herself was the snow woman; for the sake of their children she does not take his life, and she vanishes as a white mist.
Yuki-onna in folklore
Yuki-onna legends vary from region to region. In some she asks travelers to hold her baby; in others she melts away when put in a hot bath. The stories convey the harshness of winter and the terror of blizzards, and are also told as tales of marriage between a human and an otherworldly being. She was painted by Toriyama Sekien in his illustrated yokai books.
