Yuki-onna

Overview

Hearn’s Musashi story begins with two woodcutters, the elderly Mosaku and his eighteen-year-old apprentice Minokichi. A snowstorm overtakes them on their return journey, and the ferry is stranded on the opposite bank. They shelter in the ferryman’s small, unheated hut. During the night Minokichi sees a woman dressed in white bending over Mosaku, breathing something like luminous white smoke upon him. She then approaches the younger man. Her beauty and her frightening eyes coexist; this is not an account of an indistinct shape seen only at a distance.

The visitor says that she intended to kill Minokichi too, but spares him because of his youth. She makes his survival conditional on silence, explicitly including his mother among those he must not tell. After she leaves, Mosaku is found frozen and dead. Minokichi is rescued the next morning and remains ill for some time. He initially wonders whether the woman was a dream or an effect of snowlight. That uncertainty belongs to his experience within the narrative; the later recognition is what connects the two episodes.

In the following winter he meets a young woman who calls herself O-Yuki. She says that her parents have died and that she is travelling to Yedo to find work through relatives. Minokichi brings her home, his mother welcomes her, and she stays as his wife. The mother dies about five years later, praising her daughter-in-law. O-Yuki bears ten children, boys and girls, yet retains her youthful appearance. The story does not name the children, give them supernatural powers or say that all ten were born within those five years.

One night her lamplit face reminds Minokichi of the woman in the hut. At O-Yuki’s invitation he tells the old story, admitting that he has never known whether it was a dream. She identifies herself as that same visitor and reproaches him for breaking his promise. Their sleeping children are the stated reason she does not kill him. She orders him to care for them well, threatens consequences if they have cause to complain, and dissolves into white mist that escapes through the smoke-hole. Hearn ends by saying that she is never seen again; he does not narrate her death, a later reconciliation or the children’s fate.

The source is unusually specific about its mediation: Hearn says a farmer from Chōfu in Nishitama-gōri, Musashi, told him a legend of the farmer’s native village. He does not name the farmer and says he does not know whether this version had been written in Japanese. This marriage-and-silence plot is therefore a located English telling, not a complete definition of every regional snow-woman tradition.

Origins & earliest records

Kwaidan (1904), Yuki-Onna; Hearn’s prefatory statement dated Tokyo, 20 January 1904 identifies an unnamed farmer of Chōfu, Nishitama-gōri, Musashi. This dates and locates the selected English witness, not the first appearance of the wider tradition.

Records & interpretation

The complete Yuki-Onna narrative and Hearn’s prefatory provenance statement were read. The hut, breath, ten children, recognition and final disappearance are textual evidence for this telling; no independent report of a supernatural death is claimed.

Additional images

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In the literature

Selected bibliography

Documented works and useful reading. This is not a list of every appearance.

1. 01

   Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things — Yuki-Onna

   Lafcadio Hearn, reteller; unnamed Chōfu farmer, reported informant · 1904

   Complete selected story and Hearn’s January 1904 prefatory provenance statement read. Modern digitizer notes are distinguished from Hearn’s text.

2. 02

   Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

   Lafcadio Hearn · 1904

   Public English e-text; author’s preface dated Tokyo, 20 January 1904.

Family, evolution & connections

O-Yuki, Minokichi and their ten children

Hearn’s selected Musashi narrative, published in Kwaidan (1904).

The joint-parent heading branches to the ten expressly stated children collectively. No children’s names or individual sex assignments are supplied. O-Yuki and the snow woman are the same narrative individual. Her introductory account of deceased parents is a character’s claim, not a basis for a larger reconstructed pedigree; other versions remain separate.

Located primary passages

Specific passages supporting details in this entry, grouped by their published witness.

References

Sources supporting this profile. Linked pages have their own scope and editorial standards.

1. Historical English literary retellingHearn, Kwaidan, Yuki-Onna — complete narrativeResearch access: 2026-10-05
2. Author’s reported oral provenanceHearn’s prefatory source statement for Yuki-OnnaResearch access: 2026-10-05

Image credits

Yuki-onna

Image associated with the exact linked encyclopedia article; consult credited file description for its interpretation.

Further credits appear with each additional image.