Yuki-onna Niigata Legend

The Niigata yuki-onna legend is a snow-country tradition in which a beautiful woman in white robes appears on a blizzard night and freezes a traveller to death. In the Echigo (Niigata) tradition, a father and son or master and apprentice lose their way in the mountains and shelter in a hut; the door opens and a white woman comes in. She breathes on the elder and kills him with frost, but spares the young one with the warning, 'Tell no one of tonight.' Years later the young man takes a beautiful wife from the snow country and they live happily; one night he carelessly speaks of the past, and she shows her true form as the yuki-onna and disappears into the snow. The standard form is the same as the version made famous in Lafcadio Hearn's 'Yuki-Onna' in Kwaidan. The structure has three parts: encounter on a stormy night and selection of life or death; the giving of a taboo ('do not tell') and the marriage life; and the breaking of the taboo and the wife's departure. The combination of a heterotype marriage of the Tsuru-no-Ongaeshi family and a taboo-breaking motif places this cycle with the white-snake wife, the fox wife and the clam wife as a representative heterotype-wife tale. The realities of heavy snow and frost mortality in the snow country provide the natural ground of the tale. The setting includes the snowy Uonuma, Minami-Uonuma, Ojiya and Tokamachi districts of central Niigata and the mountain areas of Joetsu. Related variants are widely distributed in mountain villages of Yamagata, Akita, Aizu (Fukushima), northern Nagano and Iwate. The cycle is a common phenomenon of the Sea-of-Japan snow-country area. Sources include Lafcadio Hearn's 'Yuki-Onna' in Kwaidan (1904); Hearn's original was a retelling of an old farmer's account from Chofu-mura, Nishitama-gun, in modern Ome, Tokyo. Yanagita Kunio's Yukiguni no Haru, the folklore volume of the Niigata prefectural history and the folklore studies of Echigo preserve local variants.