Yuki-onna, the snow woman of Kwaidan, 1904

In the introduction to Kwaidan, dated Tōkyō, 20 January 1904, Lafcadio Hearn says that “Yuki-Onna” was told to him by a farmer of Chōfu, in Nishitama district, Musashi province, as a legend of his native village.¹⁰⁹ He adds that he does not know whether it was ever written down in Japanese.⁹ Komatsu Kazuhiko writes that the snow woman who takes up with a man first appears in Hearn’s book.¹¹

Tōda Masaru argues that Aoki Junji’s book of 1930, and the folktale versions after it, come from Hearn.⁴⁵ Makino Yōko, who wrote on the story in 1989, accepts that conclusion and objects to how Tōda presented it.⁶⁷

Hearn’s names, in other people’s books

Makino reports that Tōda identifies the first of these books as Aoki Junji’s Yama no densetsu of 1930, which prints the story as a Japanese tale without crediting Hearn.⁴ A newspaper column on Tōda’s 2023 book puts it the same way: a regional collection of legends from 1930 printed “Yuki-onna” without saying it was Hearn’s work, and the belief that it was an old local tale grew from there.¹² The publisher describes the book as showing that Hearn wrote the story in English as a modern short story, and that translations and adaptations carried it into the provinces as a local legend, an oral tale and a folktale.¹³

Tōda counts eight descendants of Hearn’s text, from Aoki’s book of 1930 through Matsutani Miyoko’s Shinano no minwa of 1957 to the Tōno storyteller Suzuki Satsu’s telling of 1993.⁵ Makino adds that Iwaya Sazanami’s Daigoen of 1935 gathers tales from written sources and names them, and that its snow-woman entry cites Aoki.¹⁴ The folklorist Konno Enpo, in his book of 1981, noted that at least three local legend and folktale books by local writers printed Hearn’s tale with Mosaku, Minokichi and O-Yuki.¹⁵¹⁶

Makino does not dispute Tōda’s conclusion that Hearn’s text lies behind Matsutani’s folktales, and says she had already treated the Shinano tales as later than Hearn in her 1989 article.⁶ What she objects to is the framing. Tōda’s book presents the origin of Hearn’s tale as a dispute among Hearn scholars, and to her knowledge only Muramatsu Shin’ichi, in a short piece in a small society magazine in 1998, held that it came from a local legend.⁷ She notes that Kwaidan was a common English-class text in the old middle schools.¹⁷

Her doubt about the last link is specific. Tōda traces Suzuki Satsu’s telling to a Tōno doctor who taught her the story, probably out of Matsutani’s book; Makino asks why a doctor could not have read Hearn directly.¹⁸

What the collectors wrote down

Folklorists who gathered snow-woman stories report a different figure. In Yanagita Kunio’s Tōno monogatari of 1910, section 103 says the snow woman comes out to play on the night of the small New Year, or on any winter full-moon night, and brings many children with her.¹⁹ Village children are told to come home early on those nights, and few people say they have seen her.¹⁹ The section says nothing of killing or marriage.

Konno Enpo lists her names as yuki-musume, yuki-jorō, yuki-baba, yuki-furi-baba and Shikkenken, according to Makino.¹⁶ He sorts the stories into three kinds: a snow spirit seen from afar, the ghost of someone who died in a blizzard, and a joke tale in which she melts.¹⁶

The farmer of Chōfu

The legend the farmer told survives in no printed form, Makino wrote in 1989.⁹ Ōsawa Takayuki, as Makino quotes him, points out that Hearn’s introduction is part of the work, so the farmer of Chōfu may be fiction.²⁰

A bulletin of the Edo-Tokyo Museum, recording a literary walk through Ōme in November 2010, says otherwise. It says the story is based on a tale from Ōme, and that the farmer was Sōhachi, a carpenter from Chōfu village whose daughter Hana worked in the Koizumi household and who told the story to Hearn’s wife Setsu, who passed it on.²¹ For this the bulletin cites a 2002 book on the snow woman, which we have not seen.²¹ It adds that Chōfu village was formed in 1889 from four villages that lie in today’s Ōme, and that a monument to the story’s connection was put up in 2002 at the foot of Chōfu bridge, because the setting is inferred to be Chōfu village.²²

Hearn’s introduction does not name the farmer.⁹

Kinjuro’s white face

Hearn had met a snow woman before the farmer. In Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, published in 1894, his gardener Kinjuro in Matsue tells him about the Yuki-Onna in the snow.²³ She is “the White One that makes the Faces in the snow”, does no harm and only makes people afraid, and her face is enormous, white and lonesome.²³

The same chapter carries a note: in other parts of Japan, Hearn writes, he has heard her described as a very beautiful phantom who lures young men to lonesome places to suck their blood.²⁴ Makino quotes a letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain from February 1893 in which Hearn says the Japanese have “Snow-women” who do no harm and do not speak, and that sometimes while he sleeps the Yuki-onna slips her white arm through the shutters and touches his chest.²⁵ A notebook found after his death holds several Japanese comic verses about her, with English translations, and a pencil sketch of the snow woman he imagined, Makino says.²⁶

Sōgi in Echigo

In the oldest snow-woman text we read, she only appears. Sōgi shokoku monogatari is a five-volume book printed in Kyoto in 1685, with the renga poet Sōgi, who lived from 1421 to 1502, as its narrator.² A tale in volume 5 has him see a woman in white outside at dawn in Echigo, and when he mentions it to people next morning they name her the snow spirit, yuki-onna.²⁷

Makino’s summary has the woman stand at the edge of a bamboo thicket, walk quietly and vanish, with Sōgi told that the snow spirit rarely appears in a great snow.³ She places the passage in the book’s preface; in the Waseda University Library copy we read, it is the tale headed 化女苦朧夜雪 in volume 5.³²⁷ We read only some lines of it closely.

The name and a picture of a snow woman also reached Edo picture books. In the National Diet Library’s printing of Toriyama Sekien’s Hyakki yagyō, dated 1805, one plate is labelled 雪女 and shows a long-haired woman in a long robe among snowy bamboo, her face turned down.²⁸ We did not establish when the plate first appeared.

Makino reports that no text like Hearn’s has turned up from before his time.⁸