The Snow Woman (Yuki-Onna)

In a village in the province of Musashi there once lived two woodcutters, Mosaku and Minokichi. Mosaku was an old man by then, and Minokichi, who worked under him, was a boy of eighteen. Every day the two of them walked to a forest about five miles from the village. On the way they had to cross a wide river by ferry. More than one bridge had been built at the crossing, but each had been swept away in a flood, for no ordinary bridge can stand against the current there when the river rises.

One bitterly cold evening, as the woodcutters were heading home, a heavy snowstorm caught them. When they reached the ferry, they found the boatman had gone, leaving his boat on the far bank. It was no weather for swimming, so they took shelter in the ferryman’s hut and counted themselves lucky to have any shelter at all. There was no brazier and nowhere to make a fire. It was a tiny hut, just two mats in size, with one door and no window. The two men shut the door and lay down to rest under their straw raincoats. At first they did not feel too cold, and they thought the storm would soon blow over.

The old man fell asleep almost at once, but young Minokichi lay awake for a long time, listening to the dreadful wind and the snow beating endlessly on the door. The river roared, and the hut rocked and creaked like a ship at sea. It was a terrible storm, the air grew colder by the minute, and Minokichi shivered under his raincoat. But at last, cold as it was, he too fell asleep.

He woke to a spray of snow on his face. The door had been forced open, and by the glow of the snow he saw a woman in the hut, a woman dressed all in white. She was leaning over Mosaku and breathing on him, and her breath was like bright white smoke. Then, almost in the same instant, she turned to Minokichi and bent over him. He tried to shout but could not make a sound. Lower and lower the white woman stooped, until her face almost touched his, and he saw that she was very beautiful, though her eyes frightened him.

For a little while she gazed at him. Then she smiled and said softly, “I meant to treat you as I treated the other man. But I can’t help pitying you, because you are so young. You are a handsome boy, Minokichi, and I will not harm you now. But if you ever tell anyone, even your own mother, about what you have seen tonight, I shall know, and then I will kill you. Do not forget what I say!”

With that she turned away and went out through the door. Now he found he could move, and he jumped up and looked outside, but the woman was nowhere to be seen, and the snow was blowing wildly into the hut. Minokichi shut the door and wedged it with several pieces of firewood. He wondered whether the wind had blown it open. Perhaps he had only been dreaming, and had mistaken the gleam of snow in the doorway for a woman in white, but he could not be sure. He called to Mosaku and was frightened when the old man did not answer. Reaching out in the dark, he touched Mosaku’s face and found it ice-cold. Mosaku was stiff and dead.

By dawn the storm had passed, and when the ferryman came back to his post a little after sunrise, he found Minokichi lying unconscious beside Mosaku’s frozen body. Minokichi was quickly looked after and soon came round, but he was ill for a long time from the cold of that dreadful night. The old man’s death had frightened him badly too, but he said nothing about the woman in white. As soon as he was well, he went back to his trade, walking alone to the forest every morning and coming home at dark with his bundles of wood, which his mother helped him sell.

One evening the next winter, on his way home, he caught up with a girl going the same way. She was tall and slender and very pretty, and when he greeted her she answered in a voice as sweet as a songbird’s. He walked along beside her and they fell to talking. She said her name was O-Yuki, that she had recently lost both her parents and that she was going to Yedo, where she had some poor relations who might help her find work as a servant.

Minokichi was soon enchanted by this strange girl, and the more he looked at her, the lovelier she seemed. He asked whether she was promised to anyone, and she laughed and said she was free. Then she asked whether he was married or engaged, and he told her that although he had only a widowed mother to support, the matter of an “honorable daughter-in-law” had not yet come up, since he was still so young. After sharing these secrets they walked a long way without a word. But as the proverb says, when the wish is there, the eyes can say as much as the mouth. By the time they reached the village, they were very taken with each other, and Minokichi invited O-Yuki to rest a while at his house.

After a shy pause she went with him, and his mother welcomed her and made her a hot meal. O-Yuki behaved so charmingly that Minokichi’s mother took a liking to her at once and talked her into putting off her journey to Yedo. And in the natural way of things, O-Yuki never went to Yedo at all. She stayed in the house as the “honorable daughter-in-law.”

She made a very good daughter-in-law. When Minokichi’s mother died, about five years later, her last words were words of love and praise for her son’s wife. And O-Yuki gave Minokichi ten children, boys and girls, all of them handsome and very fair-skinned.

The country people thought O-Yuki a marvel, different by nature from themselves. The villagers watched their own lives change with age and work, but O-Yuki, even after ten children, looked as young as on the day she first came to the village.

One night, after the children had gone to sleep, O-Yuki sat sewing by the light of a paper lantern, and Minokichi, watching her, said, “Seeing you sewing there with the light on your face reminds me of a strange thing that happened when I was eighteen. I saw someone then as beautiful and as white as you are now. In fact, she looked very like you.”

Without looking up from her work, O-Yuki said, “Tell me about her. Where did you see her?”

So Minokichi told her about the terrible night in the ferryman’s hut, about the White Woman who had bent over him, smiling and murmuring, and about old Mosaku’s silent death.

“Asleep or awake,” he said, “that was the only time I ever saw anyone as beautiful as you. Of course, she wasn’t human, and I was afraid of her, terribly afraid, but she was so white! To this day I’ve never been sure whether I saw a dream or the Woman of the Snow.”

O-Yuki flung down her sewing, sprang up, bent over Minokichi where he sat and shrieked into his face, “It was I, I, I! It was Yuki! And I warned you that I would kill you if you ever said one word about it! If it weren’t for those children sleeping there, I would kill you this very moment! Now you had better take very, very good care of them, for if they ever have reason to complain of you, I will treat you as you deserve!”

Even as she screamed, her voice grew thin, like the wailing of the wind. Then she melted into a bright white mist that rose up to the roof beams and drifted away, trembling, through the smoke hole. No one ever saw her after that.

Where this story comes from

“Yuki-Onna” is one of the ghost stories in Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904). In his introduction Hearn says it was told to him by a farmer of Chōfu, in Musashi province, as a legend of his native village, and that he did not know whether it had ever been written down in Japanese.

Yuki-Onna means the Snow Woman, and Hearn notes that the name O-Yuki, meaning “Snow,” was a common one. Hearn’s telling is quiet and eerie rather than gory: old Mosaku simply freezes in his sleep, and the Snow Woman spares the boy only on one condition.

Read the original: Kwaidan (Project Gutenberg)

Suggested for ages 9–12 with an adult: includes death from supernatural cold, threats to kill a young man and a mother leaving her children.

The same threat meets a different relationship

In the hut, Minokichi has no meaningful choice about keeping silent: the condition is backed by a threat to kill him. Years later he speaks to the person he trusts as his wife, not to an enemy trying to expose her. The revelation turns an intimate conversation into the return of that earlier terror.

Yuki’s concern for the children changes the outcome. She spares him again, this time because of responsibilities created during their life together. The story’s supernatural rule is not advice to keep a secret when someone threatens harm.

Compare the two spared lives

Write Yuki’s reason for sparing Minokichi in each scene. What has changed besides his age? Then distinguish a freely made promise from a demand enforced by fear; explain why seeking trusted help with a threat is different from casual gossip.

Think about it

• Why did the Snow Woman spare Minokichi?
• What clues suggest that O-Yuki is not an ordinary woman?
• Why do you think the Snow Woman left instead of keeping her threat?

More stories like this

• The Grateful Crane — a Japanese wife whose secret is discovered
• The Goblin of Adachigahara — a frightening night in a lonely hut
• The Ogre of Rashomon — a Japanese monster in human disguise