A winter yōkai for the winter season.
This is a yuki onna 雪女, or snow woman.
They go by many names depending on where you are in Japan, but the basic idea is the same:
a woman in the snow.
She’s a super popular yōkai.
Most stories about her came from these snowy parts of Japan.
Let’s go over what she does, then talk about some of her folktales.
[she's frozen your big toe]
They’re beautiful and tall, with long black hair.
They have skin as white as snow and as cold as ice.
If you run into one, she’d be sporting a thin white kimono. Sometimes it’s thin enough to be translucent.
Sometimes she’s even nude, with only her eyes and hair standing out from the snow.
From faraway, she floats around like a snowflake in the breeze,
but a lot bigger and human shaped.
She leaves no footprints. Sometimes she has no feet at all.
It’s hard to resist standing there and watching her, but then she gets close and you realize you made a mistake,
because she has a superpower.
While your brain is rebooting after being smacked by her beauty,
she can breathe her cold breath upon you and drain your life force,
leaving you a frozen corpse with an icicle in your pants.
She likes to attack people in snowstorms, and is even known to break into homes at night to freeze an entire family.
Not all stories of yuki onna are of the evil kind.
Sometimes they fall in love and marry humans. And sometimes they’re helpful.
[Good or evil?]
Different regions have different beliefs about this yōkai.
Sometimes she’s good, sometimes she’s evil. Behold, the good beliefs.
Some say she appears when winter changes to spring, to say goodbye to the winter season.
If you happen to see her and treat her with kindness, she would turn into gold the next morning.
In some regions, she appears on January 15, a day called the Little New Year.
It marks the end of new year celebrations.
Some say this idea started in ancient times when folks worshipped the yuki onna as a god
who could bring good luck to the new year.
Others say she was a servant of the mountain god who brought fertility and good harvests.
One strange version of the yuki onna has her traveling on the wind on days with light snowfall.
She walks around asking people to give her water, hot or cold.
If you give her cold water, she bulges up like a secksy blowfish.
If you give her hot water, she melts and disappears.
She’s not always harmless, she can be deadly.
Consider the baby trap.
A yuki onna would stand in the snow holding a baby.
She’d ask anyone passing by to hug the child.
Now you may think, well babies are cute, I can hug a baby.
You stupid idiot.
Once you hug the baby, it becomes heavier and heavier until you sink into the snow and freeze to death.
But if you can resist the heavy baby, you would gain great strength.
Another yōkai, the ubume, also likes this trick.
Some stories say that even if you refuse to hug her baby, she would just push you down a cliff.
However, once a clever man survived his encounter with a baby-wielding snow woman.
He hugged the baby, but held a knife with his teeth, pointing it at the baby’s head.
If she tried anything, he’d kill her baby.
She didn’t try anything,
neither did the baby.
After some adorable hugs, the man returned it.
The yuki onna thanked him and gave him treasures.
Another fun belief is that if a yuki onna calls you and you ignore her,
she would shove you down the mountain.
But then there’s an opposite belief where if you do talk to a yuki onna, she would eat you.
Some say she appears only on full moon nights when there is newly fallen snow.
Parents warn children not to play outside on such nights because she likes to steal the livers of children.
[yay stories]
The first ever known story of the yuki onna comes from a monk in the Muromachi Period [1336 - 1573].
He wrote that when he walked into his garden one snowy day,
he saw a beautiful 10 foot tall woman with skin whiter than anyone he had ever seen.
Her white kimono clung to her body,
it was almost translucent and he could almost see her skin underneath.
But, when the monk spoke to her, she disappeared.
Yeah that’s it, that’s the first ever story.
It’s very short, but you know what, size isn’t as important as coming first.
Another story goes… there was a man with a beautiful wife who had very white skin.
The man loved to take long hot baths, but his wife never took baths, and he didn’t understand why.
One chilly night, he kept urging her to take a hot bath unless she wanted to freeze from the cold.
His wife kept refusing but he kept at it. Finally she relented and went into the bathroom.
After a few minutes, the man couldn’t hear anything coming from the bathroom.
No sounds of blublublu,
or bleh-bleh-bleh,
or even ahhhh <3,
so he came in to check on her.
His wife was gone. In the steaming water were only blocks of ice, slowly melting.
Another story goes… the moon had a princess who had a tough life
because she got everything she wanted. It was way too boring.
What she found exciting was looking at the people on Earth below going about their lives.
One night she was looking down and whoops,
she fell onto the Earth in a snowy area.
She was stuck on earth, with no way of talking to the moon people above.
On snowy full moon nights, you may see her looking at the moon, wishing she could go home.
Of all the yuki onna stories out there, there is one story to rule them all.
When it was written in 1904 by Lafcadio Hearn as a love story with a twist,
it took off and pretty much became the standard for all yuki onna stories.
From then on, yuki onna stories became stories of sorrow and romance.
Hearn said he heard the story from some local man and wrote it down,
but he probably added his own changes to make for a better story.
He was known to do that to all the Japanese folktales that he retold.
Folktales in that local area were simple.
Hearn’s version was a more detailed story with love and a twist.
I did a video about Hearn’s yuki onna story. Check it out here.
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