Yuki-Onna (雪女 )

Elements of the Supernatural displayed by Yuki-Onna

Lafcadio Hearn's version:

• Appearance in a liminal space:
  • During the night, and being a snow yōkai, during a blizzard
  • In an empty building
  • Across the river from the town
• Unnatural power:
  • Cold breath like white mist that freezes people to death
  • Turns into white mist herself, disappears without a trace
• Unnatural lifespan/Potential immortality
  • Looks no different, just as young even after having ten kids and caring for them
• Striking beauty/Extremely attractive, but not like any other woman
  • Not necessarily supernatural of itself, but female supernatural creatures are often depicted as either extremely attractive, to an unnatural degree, or extremely hideous.
• Marriage to a human
  • Seen in other supernatural tales such as those of the kitsune, as well as tales of cultures other than Japanese as well (Foster, 2015).

The Yuki-Onna Story

As with any folktale, there is no single, truest tale, and stories and names may vary by region. The Yuki-Onna is no different. She is known throughout Japan by names such as Yuki-Banba, Shikkenken, Yuki-Jorō , and Yuki-Bajo. In different places, her origin and purpose are just as diverse: She may be a spirit of snow in one region, but more specifically the ghost of a woman who died in the snow in another. Toriyama Sekian also includes her among his earliest works (Foster, 2015).

However, there may certainly be versions of tales that one may consider to be the most well-known, popular, and definitive, and it is likely that in the case of the Yuki-Onna, this version is Lafcadio Hearn's 1904 English-language work, Kwaidan, featured above. Lafcadio Hearn (Linked to Aaron Acierno's page for further detail on Hearn) was a Greek-born, far-traveled foreigner in Japan, who wrote English translations of Japanese folktales for an American audience. This being the case, however, his Yuki-Onna translation became incredibly popular, and was re-translated back into Japanese as a sort of "pseudo-official" Yuki-Onna story. As such, Hearn's Yuki-Onna story is likely the most well-known and widespread version of the Yuki-Onna (Foster, 2015).

According to Hearn, the Yuki-Onna tale featured in Kwaidan, was told to him by a farmer, but the original tale has never been recovered, leading many to doubt Hearn's statement (Foster, 2015.) In fact, it is thought that Hearn's Yuki-Onna may be an attempt by Hearn to write his own tale based on and intended to blend in with Japanese folklore.

Another Tale

In the book As the Japanese See It: Past and Present (Aoki and Dardess, 1981), there is another Yuki-Onna tale, distinct from Hearn's more popular and well known tale. This tale depicts Yuki-Onna as even less dangerous than Hearn does, if not completely harmless, and explicitly describes her as being the spirit of a woman who had died in the snow.

In this tale, a man named Kyuzaemon is awoken near eleven at night by a knocking on his door. He hears a girl's voice asking to be let in, but suddenly becomes cautious, asking why he should when he doesn't even know who the girl is or what she wants so late at night. The girl assures him she only seeks shelter from the deep snow, not even food, but Kyuzaemon still refuses, and turns to go back to bed. Suddenly, he is face to face with a pretty, young woman dressed in white. She reveals to him that she is the woman he would not let into his house, and that she is the spirit of a young woman who died in the snow. She is apparently a harmless spirit, as she wishes to pray to Kyuzaemon's ancestors with him to assure both he and they that she will not harm him. As Kyuzaemon lights a lamp to pray, she glides silently over to him and tells him her story. Her name was Oyasu, daughter of Yazaemon, and she married a man named Isaburo, who had come to live with her and her father in their village, the neighboring village to Kyuzaemon's. However, after her death, Isaburo abandoned her father, leaving his home and returned to his own. Oyasu has now returned a year after her death to seek out Isaburo and have him return to her father. Afterwards, Kyuzaemon returns to sleep as Oyasu remains by the lamp. Some time later, he is awoken by the sound of her voice bidding him farewell, but she was gone before he could sit up. The next morning, Kyuzaemon went to the next village in search of Isaburo, who he found to be in Yazeamon's house. They both discussed the previous night, and found that immediately after leaving Kyuzaemon's home, around twelve-thirty Oyasu had appeared to Isaburo in his home. He said that on cold, snowy nights, she has continuously haunted him until he returned to his father-in-law, promising Oyasu's spirit that he would take care of her father throughout his old age.

(Full story available from link in Bibliography)

Yuki-Onna as an Exile

Toshiaki Komura's analysis of Hearn's Yuki-Onna sees the yō kai as an "exile" of sorts, saying that she is between states of assimilation and alienation, and raises many suggestions to support this. This includes O-Yuki traveling from an unspecified, unimportant origin, to a large city where she may just be able to find purpose, and being sidetracked along the way into a small village which she ultimately settles in. She marries a local, has children, and is welcomed by her mother-in-law and the townspeople.

Throughout this brief middle-section of the tale however, O-Yuki is described several times as different from the townspeople around her, whether through nature, appearance, or history, despite her warm welcome and apparent assimilation into the town. Komura suggests that her welcome, and Minokichi's attraction are due to her foreign strangeness, and that Minokichi's mother's approval of her serves to establish a sense of belonging for O-Yuki. After the mother's death, and thus the loss of this appreciation, is the first time Hearn describes anything innately unnatural about O-Yuki, which is her apparent lack of aging even after having ten children.

It all comes crashing down when Minokichi involves O-Yuki's origin, her background, by bringing up the night he first met her. Komura suggests that a displaced foreigner, and especially an exile as she sees Yuki-Onna, who attempts to settle somewhere else would rather not be concerned with their origin, as they are caught in between a dichotomy of assimilation in a new place at the cost of exclusion from another, and that the origin is history as they try to assimilate, which seems to be the case with O-Yuki's marriage to Minokichi (Komura, 2014).

Yuki-Onna and Hearn

Based on several factors, taken mostly from Lafcadio Hearn's history, the brief context available in Foster's book, the nature of the Kwaidan tale of the Yuki-Onna, and the analysis of Yuki-Onna as an exiled foreigner by Toshiaki Komura, I would like to suggest my own argument as to the importance of the widespread Hearn version of the Yuki-Onna.

As mentioned previously, the original farmer's tale that Lafcadio Hearn translated has not been found, leading some to believe that Hearn took stories and concepts of the Yuki-Onna that he had heard, and wrote his own original tale, using these Yuki-Onna folk legends as a base. It is said that the love story Hearn has written is more complex and complete as a story than any other Yuki-Onna folktale that is known, even by Hearn himself, which is one piece of evidence that suggests Hearn took his knowledge of European fairytales and used that to develop the Yuki-Onna into a complete written story of a "femme fatale" with clear progression from the pieces he had gathered of less complex, less structured legends of frightening but harmless snow spirits (Foster, 2015).

Taking the idea that Hearn did create his Yuki-Onna story as an original based on folklore, it is possible that, alongside trying his hand at writing a story of his own to fit in with the Japanese style he had been translating, Hearn took the opportunity to vent some of his own feeling and life into his Yuki-Onna story, which comes into line with some of Toshiaki Komura's analysis. Komura's stance that O-Yuki is a displaced foreigner facing the dichotomy of assimilating and exclusion, as well as that the Yuki-Onna story itself, as a translation, faces this same dichotomy of "exile" from its own (Japanese) culture for the purpose of assimilating and appealing to another (American), across an entirely different language and culture both. One might argue this lack of complete belonging, and being caught between places, whether they be origin and destination, or one culture and language to the next, is a liminal space even for both O-Yuki and the story itself. In this same way, it's possible Hearn used O-Yuki as a projection of himself as an outsider, a foreigner, completely different, assimilating into Japanese culture, even as he potentially faced a feeling of having no origin himself due to his constant travel to new homes during his life. Just as Hearn himself, it can be said O-Yuki came from nowhere, is clearly different from everyone else, married a local, and lived happily with her husband for a considerable amount of time.

The differences between Hearn's version and the seemingly more traditional version (as in, before the widespread popularity of Hearn's version), such as Hearn depicting the Yuki-Onna as potentially deadly, creating a fully developed story out of her, and having her appear as an outsider marrying into the community rather than being a local spirit with direct ties to the locals of the region she is present in, help to suggest that maybe Hearn's version of Yuki-Onna is more than just a translation and may very well be "his Yuki-Onna", so to speak.