People are freaked out by Spiders.
It's not just that they have so many disproportionately long legs or move erratically it's also that
they have fangs that can bite you, and they kill things wayyy bigger than they are.
Yeah, real spiders are scary.
But how about a giant spider that could actually eat you?
Meet the jorōgumo: taking the scary spider thing to a whole other level for centuries.
Appearing as an attractive woman to lure her victims to a painful death, this giant shape
shifting spider of Japanese folklore is both beautiful and deadly—like the real-world
spider that shares her name.
For now let’s explore how this deadly female monster snared imagination in her web by taking
a look at ancient storytelling and the mysterious world of the Japanese yōkai
[Monstrum intro.]
Broadly speaking the word yōkai refers to any weird or supernatural creature or phenomena
in Japanese folklore.
Yōkai offer explanations for things that seem unusual or defy the known world—they
are personal and cultural—shifting meaning or appearance based on who is telling the
story and for what purpose.
A yōkai can be pretty much anything strange, from oddly moving smoke [enenra],to head-eating
spirits [kubikajiri] or even a mischievous paper umbrella [karakasa kozō].
The word yōkai is made from two Chinese characters, kanji, that both indicate strangeness or mystery,
and the word appears in Japanese text at least as early as the eighth century [in Shoku Nihongi].
The term popped up more frequently in the mid-Edo period but wasn’t really popularized
as the term for anything unexplainable until the Meiji period (1868-1912).
A 20th-century Japanese folklorist [Yanagita Kunio] solidified its place in culture when
he began using it in his academic writing.
Before yōkai became the common term for all things creepy, spooky, and strange in Japan,
there were a whole slew of names.
The name changed based on time period and cultural popularity.
In the Heian period “oni” referred to anything threatening although most often that
thing was a demon or ogre that had a humanlike shape.
During the Edo period, another word could be used to label any shapeshifting being—
or any oddly formed or scary creature.
So the jorōgumo falls under any of these categories [yokai, oni, bakemono] since it
is a strange, threatening creature that can take on a human shape or a spider form.
Covering all the bases with all those legs I guess.
Jorōgumo first appeared in literature in the Edo period.
It is highly likely that they previously existed as part of an oral folklore tradition.
The jorō in jorōgumo , translates to prostitute, but is also associated with the word jōrō,
which historically referred to the women who waited on female royalty.
Also known as the “binding bride,” “whore spider,” “entangling bride,” and “harlot
spider,” this shapeshifting creature is unsurprisingly known for her ability to lure
handsome men into her clutches by disguising herself as a beautiful woman before using
a painful venom to kill her victims slowly.
In some stories, this venom gives the monster the ability to shapeshift.
The jorōgumo is said to spin silk strong enough to capture a man in her web and she
can control other spiders.
Illustrations sometimes show this creature as a woman with spider legs, or just as a
large spider.
Spiders play a central role in a lot of Japanese folklore.
The earliest known surviving Japanese text depicting a monstrous spider, a picture scroll
from the 14th century, includes a story about a shape-shifting Earth spider that first appears
[see page 80 of Reider text, available online] to two warriors as a beautiful woman.
She tries to trap them by throwing balls of silk webbing before they stab her and she
flees.
Later the men find a many-legged creature wounded in the same area the woman was stabbed.
They cut the creature's abdomen open and almost two thousand human heads fall out along with
spiders the size of small children [page 83].
The creature is called a [yama-goom-o] or mountain spider in the text.
This seems awfully similar to the jorōgumo and it definitely shows the association between
and spiders in Japanese folklore.
One of the earliest written stories of the jorogumo comes from a 17th-century text.
It tells of a young samurai who takes shelter in an abandoned structure strung with spider
webs.
He is approached by a young woman carrying a child who, she insists, was fathered by
him.
The man is instantly suspicious, since the woman was traveling alone at night in a remote
place.
The child goes to approach the samurai many times, but turns away each time when it sees
the man’s sword.
Annoyed and impatient, the man slashes the woman with his blade.
She flees to the rafters of the structure.
The next morning, the samurai finds an attic where a giant two-foot long spider lays, dying
from deep cuts along it’s back—exactly like the ones he gave the young woman.
A stone grave statue of a young child is there as well.
The samurai looks up—and sees a horrific sight –carcasses of all the spider-woman’s
victims, wrapped in her web.
Another tale from an 18th-century collection of ghost stories [Taihei Hyakumonogatari]
has a different twist.
One hot summer day, Magoroku, the heir of a wealthy samurai family, relaxes and sings
on his porch.
Suddenly, a woman, who appears to be about 50-years-old, approaches him.
She tells him that his singing is so beautiful, it’s making her daughter fall in love with
him, so much so that she wants to marry him.
Curious to know if what the woman says is true, he follows her to a large mansion.
Inside, he finds a beautiful young woman, who begs Magoroku to consider her as his bride.
Magoroku declines her offer, because he is in fact already wed.
Both the young woman and her mother beg him to reconsider but he remains resolute in his
devotion to his wife.
So he runs from the mansion, but the second he steps outside the door it mysteriously
vanishes, turning back into the bamboo surrounding his own house.
His servants insist that he has been on the porch sleeping the entire time, but Magoroku
cannot believe that what he experienced was only a dream.
Suddenly, he sees a female spider scuttling away.
Looking around he realizes his home is strung with numerous spider webs, even though earlier,
he had driven the spiders away with his pipe smoke.
Then he remembered how the beautiful girl told him the older woman had also been driven
away by smoking.
Magoroku realizes, to his horror, that the spiders were taking revenge on him.
He orders the servants to remove the webs, and fortunately for Magoroku, the jorogumo
never comes to him again.
An attempted revenge via bigamy and a trick to lure [loo-ur] a man to his death?
Not all yōkai are monsters, but the jorogumo certainly is.
But why spiders at all?
You could argue that part of the association comes from the cultural idea that women are
out to “ensnare” men with their physical or sexual appeal or because of the construction
of the spider web itself.
Weaving, spinning, and other elements of textile production were historically areas women dominated.
Silk weaving in particular, was an important cultural, religious, and economic activity
in Japan.
Then there’s the real life “Joro spider” or “Jorō-gumo spider” a member of the
Nephila genus.
Commonly called a “golden orb-weaver” in English, with their large size and unique,
yellow colored silk and webs, it’s unsurprising that in Japan these spiders are said to have
supernatural powers.
Some tales say that once these spiders reach 400 years of age, they develop magical powers
and can feed on humans.
They also can shapeshift into beautiful, young women.
Interestingly, female golden-orb weaver spiders are much larger than their drab, brown-colored
male counterparts.
The females are yellow, red, and black and can be up to four times larger than the males
of the species, reaching 3 to 4 inch [7.6-10 centimeters) wide leg spans.
Their golden webs can be large enough to even trap small birds and bats.
Given the name of these spiders and how closely its legends relate to the yokai, my guess
is that the real golden orb-weaver spider helped inspire the original oral folklore
of the jorōgumo.
Scary lady spider equals scary spider lady.
The East Asian golden-orb weaver spiders were first discovered in North America in 2014,
which seems ironic given that their fictional counterpart is becoming increasingly popular
here and in other parts of the globe.
While long associated with folklore in Japan, yokai have left a strong literary and visual
history.
When illustrated scrolls became popular during the Classical Heian period (c. 794-1185),
yōkai that largely existed as oral stories took on visual form.
By recording these unusual beings, their forms became more solidified in how they were portrayed,
but the art inspired many other different kinds of yōkai.
Today, we’ve seen a similar resurgence as the jorogumo becomes more well-known outside
of Japan.
The internet and a world that’s more connected than ever made manga and anime more popular
outside of Japan, and the jorōgumo pops up in both of these.
I’m always fascinated by monsters that are exclusively female, and at least with the
jorōgumo there might be a good reason, a reason seemingly based on a real animal.
Cultural and spiritual beliefs, mixed together with the natural world, weave together a story
that is completely unique—and absolutely terrifying.