Yuki-onna: The Woman Made of Snow

Two woodcutters are caught by a blizzard.

They are on the mountain road when the storm comes down too fast to outrun, and they take shelter in an old ferryman’s hut — the kind of hut kept on mountain passes for exactly this purpose. The older man, Mosaku, falls asleep quickly despite the cold. The younger, Minokichi, cannot sleep. He watches the storm through the hut’s gaps.

Then the door opens.

The snow comes in first, and behind the snow she comes — white on white, a woman of impossible beauty, her skin the color of the snow she moves through, her kimono white, her lips the only color about her. She bends over Mosaku and breathes on him. The breath is cold, visible, the cold of a winter that has decided to stop gradually and become immediate. Mosaku does not move afterward.

She turns to Minokichi.

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She looks at him for a long time. He cannot move or speak. Her eyes are not the eyes of a human woman; they are the eyes of a season, of winter itself examining what it has found in a mountain hut.

She says: I will spare you because you are young and beautiful. But if you tell anyone what you have seen tonight — if you tell anyone about me — I will kill you.

He does not answer. The cold has taken his voice.

She dissolves into the snow. The storm continues. In the morning Minokichi finds Mosaku frozen on his pallet, and the storm is gone, and the mountain road is passable, and nothing in the visible world explains what happened in the hut.

He tells no one.

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A year later, walking the mountain road again, he meets a young woman named Yuki traveling alone to Edo. She is pale — very pale, paler than illness, more the pallor of something that does not need warmth. She is beautiful in the way that the woman in the hut was beautiful. He walks with her. He is overcome by her, in the way that people in folk tales are overcome by the right person at the right moment.

They marry. They have three children, then five, then ten. She is a good wife. She does not seem to age. The children are healthy. The years pass in the way that years pass when they are happy — quickly and without remarkable incident.

Then one evening, watching his wife sewing by lamplight, Minokichi thinks of the woman in the hut. The memory of her face and his wife’s face are similar in a way he cannot ignore. He tells his wife the story.

She stands.

She says: I told you that if you told anyone I would kill you.

She says: I will spare you for the sake of our children. But I am leaving now. You will care for them well, or wherever I am, I will know it.

The cold comes into the room. She dissolves — or she leaves — the accounts are different about which. The ten children are asleep in the back room. The lamp is still lit. Minokichi sits alone with the story he told.

The children grow up without their mother.

They are healthy.

The winters are no harder than winters usually are.

Sometimes, on the coldest nights, when the snow is very white and very still, Minokichi stands at the door of his house and feels that something is watching from the mountain. Not malevolent. Not warm. Present.