For many of the Native Americans inhabiting the temperate zone, winter was the only time for telling stories. There were serious repercussions for breaking out the tales before the ground was frozen, not the least of which was the possibility that snakes and other creepy crawlies might sneak into bed with you. In Japan, on the other hand, the hot, humid summer is the time for telling snowy ghost stories. Why? To create shivers, of course! The Yuki Onna, or Snow Woman, is one such ghost. In some versions, she is a chaste young wife; in others, a supernaturally empowered harridan, but she is always terrifying enough to send a chill down the spine.
Let’s take a tour around the world of snow creature tales of old…
The Snow Maiden (Russia)
Many readers will already be familiar with the tale of the Snow Maiden. It comes to us from Old Russia, a land of sparkling forests and frozen palaces. The tale begins, as do so many folktales the world over, with an old, childless couple. They are poor and devoutly religious (poverty and piety being de riguer for old childless couples in folktales). While cutting wood in the forest, they take a break to build a snegourochka, a little girl made of snowballs. Lo and behold, the snegourochka comes to life, and she is everything the old couple ever dreamed of in a daughter. She is pretty, respectful, and well dressed in fancy boots, cloak, and diamond tiara. She helps out around the house and, conveniently for her elderly parents, she’s bypassed the diaper stage.
The storyteller would have us believe that this Snow Maiden is a gift from God, a reward for the old couple’s unwavering faith. Given the outcome of the story, however, the exercise seems cruel and pointless on God’s part. For Snegourochka is not a child of flesh but of snow. In some versions of the story, she crumples at the first sign of spring. In others, she lasts until Midsummer, only to be vaporized by the St. John’s Day fires. A few writers hint at the possibility that, like Frosty, she’ll be back again someday, but this is a modern gloss. When the girl is gone, she’s gone, and the old couple is left with nothing but a soggy patch of forest floor.
No doubt it was a witch and not an angel hiding behind one of the snow-clad fir trees in the forest that day—perhaps Baba Yaga or one of those pesky German witches flown over from the west. “Be careful what you wish for,” she might have cackled to herself as she worked her magic over the doomed little snegourochka.
Yuki Onna (Japan)
Another woodcutting foray brings us face to face with the Yuki Onna, the Japanese Woman of the Snows. No shrinking snowdrop here, the Yuki Onna is as ferocious as the Snow Maiden is sweet. In Lafcadio Hearn’s retelling of the tale, it is man who invades the wild realm of the Yuki Onna and suffers the consequences.
On their way home with their loads of wood, teenage Minokichi and the elderly Mosaku are stranded on the wrong side of the river by a snow storm. They find shelter in a tiny boathouse but have no means of lighting a fire. Old Mosaku soon falls asleep. Losing his battle against the cold, Minikichi also sleeps, but only for an instant. He wakes to see a white-clad woman breathing cold white smoke over the sleeping Mosaku. To the younger man’s horror, the spirit is about to do the same to Minokichi, but she pauses and he is able to look up into her starkly beautiful face. The Yuki Onna spares him on account of his youth and because she has taken a shine to him. But she warns him to tell no one what he has seen; if he does, she will kill him.
Minokichi survives the night, just barely, while Mosaku is frozen to death. Minokichi tells himself this Woman of the Snows was probably just a hallucination. He goes on with his life as a woodcutter and thinks no more of the strange apparition.
The next winter, he meets a pretty girl on the forest path. Her name is O-Yuki. Long story short, they become husband and wife. O-Yuki bears her woodcutter ten children, but mysteriously does not age a day.
At last, in the candlelight one evening, thick-as-a-brick Minokichi notices a resemblance between the ageless O-Yuki and the spirit he thought he saw all those years ago. He tells O-Yuki everything, thus breaking his promise to the Yuki Onna. Never mind that they’re one and the same—O-Yuki/Yuki Onna is livid. This time, it is for the sake of the children that she spares Minokichi’s life. She threatens the bewildered woodcutter once more with death if he does not take proper care of the little ones, then she disappears.
This is, thanks to Hearn, the most famous version of the Yuki Onna story, but it is not the only one. In another variation set down by Victorian world-traveler and collector of tales, Richard Gordon Smith, the Yuki Onna is a ghost in the more usual sense: she is the spirit of a young woman named Oyasu who died in a snowstorm. On the eve of the anniversary of her death, Oyasu presents herself not to her own family but to an old widower named Kyuzaemon.
Poor Kyuzaemon bars the door against the unearthly stranger only to turn around and see her standing next to his bed. She has long hair, a pretty face, and the signature white kimono. She explains to Kyuzaemon that she wishes to
