Oguni Yuki-onna Legend

The Oguni Yuki-onna tradition is a regional variant of the yuki-onna tale told in mountain villages of Oguni Town, Nishi-Okitama District, Yamagata. On a snowstorm night, two woodcutters take shelter in a mountain hut; while they sleep, a woman in white enters, breathes on the elder and freezes him to death, and tells the younger "Speak of this night to no one" before going out. Years later the young woodcutter takes a beautiful wife, has children, and lives in peace until one snowy night he confides the hut event to his wife; the wife reveals that she was the yuki-onna of that night, spares his life for the sake of the children, and departs. The story has three stages: the meeting and taboo at the mountain hut on a snowstorm night, the years of marriage and peace, and the breaking of the taboo and the disclosure of the wife's true form with their parting. The structure of losing love by breaking a "speak-not" taboo connects with the "Tsuru no Ongaeshi" and other otherworld-marriage tales. Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan version is world-famous, but the prototype is the local folk tale widely spread through Tohoku, Hokuriku, and the Koshin highlands; the Oguni line stands as one such variant. The central area is the foot of the Asahi range and the Iide range bordering Niigata, a deep-snow zone where mountain work and the yuki-onna tale closely intertwine. Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan (Meiji 37, 1904) "Yuki-Onna" is the world-known version; Yanagita Kunio's Tono Monogatari and Yama no Jinsei, the Yamagata Prefectural Board of Education's Yamagata Kenshi Minzoku-hen, and Oguni Town records carry the local variant.