Ōme, Tokyo, Japan (folk tale)

Yuki-onna: The Snow Woman

Folklore — not a documented case

Lafcadio Hearn's famous 1904 snow woman story was collected from a village on the Tama River. A monument beside Chōfu Bridge now commemorates the tale.

Yuki-onna, the 'Snow Woman', is one of the best-known yōkai of Japanese folklore: a pale, strikingly beautiful woman in white who appears on snowy nights. Her most famous telling is in Lafcadio Hearn's 1904 book Kwaidan, where Hearn writes that he heard the story from a farmer of Chōfu village in Musashi Province. That village now lies within Ōme City, in western Tokyo.

The stories in this section are folk tales and legends; they are not verified, real events and should not be confused with the rest of the archive.

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