Documents

Sōgi shokoku monogatari, vol. 5 (1685): the snow-woman tale, heading and three lines

Language

Japanese

Read from

PDF spreads 89 (illustration; heading on the first line block of the right page) and 90 (right page, columns 3 to 4; left page, final columns). Each spread is a double page, right-hand page first

Reading

transcribed from the page image

Translation

ours

Retrieved

15 October 2026

Sōgi shokoku monogatari (宗祇諸國物語, “Sōgi’s tales of the provinces”, our rendering) is a five-volume book of tales published in Kyoto by Sakagami Shōbee in Jōkyō 2 (1685), with Nishimura Hanbee of Kanda (Edo) listed as co-publisher. The copy photographed here is Waseda University Library’s ヘ13 01653 (one bound volume, flagged for worm damage and losses). Volume 5 has a tale whose first spread (PDF 89) has a woodblock illustration on the left page, showing a long-haired woman in a long robe standing among bamboo in snow while a bearded man watches from a veranda, and the heading and the start of the text on the right. The text is a woodblock-printed running hand with readings printed beside the characters.

Only the lines below were read closely. Most of the tale was not transcribed. The three lines carry the points the article needs: the heading, the morning after, and the word yuki-onna.

Translation

1. The heading. 化女苦朧夜雪. The third character, 苦, is uncertain, and so is how the heading is meant to be read. It seems to say something like “the woman apparition, [?], snow on a hazy night” (our rendering; uncertain).

2. The morning after. “When day broke, he told people about this.”

3. The word. The first two characters of the last column read 雪女, “snow woman”, followed by と (“as” or “that”). The words after it were not read confidently and are left out. This is the only place on these two spreads where we are sure of the word itself; the lines just before it, where the people of Echigo seem to name her, were not read through.

Notes

The tale is a seventeenth-century story about the medieval renga poet Sōgi (1421 to 1502), who travels as its narrator; the book was printed nearly two centuries after his death. Makino Yōko (成城大學經濟研究 201, 2013, note 1) summarises a snow-woman passage from this book: Sōgi, in Echigo, sees a pale woman in a white single robe at the edge of a bamboo thicket at dawn, and later hears that it was a snow spirit, commonly called 雪女. She places the passage in the book’s preface; the Waseda copy has it as a tale in volume 5. Our reading agrees with the heading and the morning-after sentence and with the use of the word 雪女 as Makino reports it, and goes no further.

The page images are Waseda University Library’s. Their terms require a permit and a fee for commercial use, so no image from this copy is on the site; the text is quoted here only as far as we could read it.