Saga Jorogumo Legend

The Saga jorogumo legend is a regional variant of the spider-woman cycle, in which a long-lived spider takes the form of a beautiful woman and lures travellers into a mountain pool. In Saga the encounter is set on the upper Kase River, around Fuji-cho and Mitsuse-mura in the mountains north of Saga City. A woodcutter or night-angler meets a beautiful woman at a deep pool, becomes intimate with her, and only realises her nature when threads of spider-silk begin to wind around his body, or when his axe stays caught on a tree root that turns out to be wound with her silk. The structure of seduction, threading and escape mirrors the Shizuoka Shizuhata-yama variant. The visual and textual canon is set in Toriyama Sekien's Gazu Hyakki Yagyo (1776), with later parallels in the Hokuetsu Seppu by Suzuki Bokushi (1837); local variants are recorded in the folklore volume of the Saga prefectural history.