| Yuki-onna | |
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Other Names |
yuki-musume, yuki-onago, yukijorō , yuki anesa, yuki-onba, yukinba, yukifuri-baba, surara-onna, kanekori-musume, and shigama-nyōbō |
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First Appearance |
Japanese Folklore |
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Created by |
Japanese Folklore |
Origin[]
Yuki-onna is a yōkai in Japanese folklore. Yuki-onna appears on snowy nights as a tall, beautiful woman with long black hair and blue lips. Her inhumanly pale or even transparent skin makes her blend into the snowy landscape. She often wears a white kimono, but other legends describe her as nude, with only her face and hair standing out against the snow. Despite her inhuman beauty, her eyes can strike terror into mortals. She floats across the snow, leaving no footprints (in fact, some tales say she has no feet, a feature of many Japanese ghosts), and she can transform into a cloud of mist or snow if threatened.
They often appear in stories about inter-species marriage, and stories similar to Lafcadio Hearn's Yuki-onna where a mountain hunter gets together with a woman who stays the night as a guest and eventually births a child. One day the man carelessly talks about the taboo of getting together with a yuki-onna, resulting in the woman revealing herself to be a yuki-onna, but not killing the man due to having a child between them and warning, "If anything happens to the child, you won't get away with it" before going away.
Old tales about yuki-onna are mostly stories of sorrow, and it is said that these tales started from when people who have lived gloomy lives, such as childless old couples or single men in mountain villages, would hear the sound of a blizzard knocking on their shutter door and fantasize that the thing that they longed for has come. It is said that after that, they would live in happiness with what they longed for in a fantasy as fleeting as snow. There is also a feeling of fear, and like as in the Tōno Monogatari, the sound of a blizzard knocking on an outer shōji is called the "shōji sasuri" (rubbing a shōji), and there is a custom of making children who stayed up late go to sleep quickly when a yuki-onna rubs a shōji. From real sayings such as the shōji sasuri, it is said that things that one longs for sit back-to-back with fear. Also, winter is the season when gods would come to visit, and if one does not pay respects, terrible things will happen, so even if it is said to be things that one longs for, one cannot put too much trust in that. In any case, it can be said to be related to the coming and going of seasons.
Public Domain Literary Appearances[]
- “Of Ghosts and Goblins,” ch. 25 of Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, vol. 2, by Lafcadio Hearn, 1894.
- “Yuki‐Onna,” in Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, 怪談, by Lafcadio Hearn, 1904.
- “Yuki‐Onna,” in The Romance of the Milky Way and Other Studies & Stories, by Lafcadio Hearn, 1905.
- “The Snow Ghost,” in Ancient Tales and Folklore of Japan, by Richard Gordon Smith, 1908.
Notes[]
- The Pokemon Frosslass, which first appeared in the games Pokemon Diamond & Pearl, is inspired by the Yuki-onna.