Yuki-onna

The story

In the province of Musashi, long ago, there lived two woodcutters.

The elder was called Mosaku. He was seventy years old, with hands as hard as bark, and he knew the forest better than his own home. The younger, Minokichi, was eighteen and worked as his apprentice: he carried the axes, loaded the wood, listened and learned. Every morning they set off together, and every evening they came back together. To get home they had to cross a wide river, and to cross it they took the ferry.

One evening at the end of winter, on the way home, it began to snow.

At first there were only a few flakes, large and slow. Then the wind turned, and in an instant the forest vanished behind a white wall. When they reached the river, there was nobody on the bank. The ferryman had left his boat on the far side and gone home, in a storm like that.

“We can't cross,” said Mosaku. “We'll have to wait.”

There was a hut nearby: a wooden shelter with a single door and no stove, where the ferryman rested on sunny days. They went in, wedged the door shut with a pole and lay down on the straw, wrapped in their straw cloaks. Outside, the wind howled. Mosaku, worn out, fell asleep at once. Minokichi did not. For a long time he lay with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling and listening to the snow beating against the planks.

Then he fell asleep too.

It was a sting of cold on his face that woke him: a handful of snow had landed on his cheek. He opened his eyes. The door was wide open. There was no wind now. There was no sound at all. Outside, the forest was motionless and blue in the light of the snow.

There was a woman in the hut.

She was dressed in white, tall and slender, with black hair falling to her hips. Her face was beautiful and pale as the moon, and her eyes did not move. She was bending over Mosaku, a few inches from his face, and from her mouth came a slow white breath, which the old man breathed in without waking.

Minokichi wanted to scream, but no sound came. He wanted to move, but his body would not obey.

The woman raised her head. She turned, slowly, and bent over him too. Her face was so close that the young man could see every eyelash, each one coated in frost.

“I meant to treat you like the other one,” she said. Her voice was a whisper, like snow sliding off a branch. “But you are young, and so handsome, and I pity you. I will not harm you, Minokichi.”

How did she know his name?

“But remember,” she went on. “If you ever tell anyone, anyone at all, even your mother, what you have seen tonight, I will know. And I will come for you. Remember what I have told you.”

She turned away. She crossed the threshold, and her figure faded into the blue light, thinner than the light itself.

When the sun rose, Minokichi was at last able to move. He touched Mosaku, and found him stiff and cold as ice.

For many weeks the boy lay in bed with a fever. When he recovered, he told no one what had happened. He said only that there had been a blizzard, and that Mosaku had never woken up.

A year went by.

One winter evening, on his way home from gathering wood, Minokichi met a girl on the path. She was walking alone, with a bundle in her hand. She was tall, with pale skin and long hair, and when she stopped to greet him, her voice rang like a little bell.

“My name is O-Yuki,” she said. “My parents are dead. I'm going to Edo to look for work as a servant, with a family who will take me in.”

Minokichi looked at her, and something stirred inside him that he could not name. They talked as they walked. Then he said, “Stay with us before you go on. My mother will give you something to eat.”

O-Yuki stayed one day. Then another. Minokichi's mother liked her at once, for the way she kept the house, the way she spoke softly, the way she sewed. After a while nobody mentioned Edo any more. A few months later, O-Yuki and Minokichi were married.

She was a good wife. She cooked, kept the house in order, cared for her mother-in-law as long as she lived, and gave Minokichi ten children, handsome and fair-skinned like her. The neighbours said it was strange: the other women of the village grew old, but she did not. After so many years she still looked like a girl.

One evening, the children were asleep and O-Yuki was sewing by the light of the lamp. Minokichi, sitting opposite, was watching her. The firelight drew a soft shadow across her face, and for a moment he saw her in a different light, and something he had forgotten came back to him.

“You know,” he said, “looking at you tonight, I remembered something strange. When I was eighteen, on a night of blizzard, I saw a woman in white, beautiful and pale like you. I don't know if it was a dream or not. But that woman, I swear, looked exactly like you.”

O-Yuki did not look up from her work.

“Tell me more,” she said. “Where did you see her?”

And Minokichi told her everything: the hut by the river, the open door, Mosaku, the white breath, the promise. As he spoke, the lamp began to flicker, though there was no draught.

O-Yuki put down her sewing. She stood up. Her face had no expression left.

“That woman was me,” she said. “It was me. And I told you never to speak of it to anyone.”

Cold filled the room. Swirls of frost appeared on the paper of the doors.

“I ought to kill you, Minokichi. I ought to do it now.” She turned her head towards the sleeping children. “But they are here, and for their sake I spare you. Take care of our children. If they ever have a single reason to complain of you, I will know.”

Her voice grew thinner and thinner, a breath coming from far away. Her figure grew pale, and melted into a white mist. It rose slowly to the ceiling, then trembled, and slipped out through the smoke-hole.

Minokichi was left alone, with the lamp and his sleeping children.

O-Yuki was never seen again.