Yuki-onna - a Spirit or Yokai in Japanese Folklore

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Yuki Onna (snow lady) is a spirit or yōkai in Japanese legends. She is a prevalent figure in Japanese literary works, manga, and cartoon.

She may also go by such names as yuki-musume "snow girl",yuki-onago "snow wench", yukijorō "snow harlot", yuki anesa "snow sis'", yuki-omba "snow granny or snow nanny", yukinba "snow hag" (Ehime), yukifuri-baba(?) "snowfall hag"(Nagano).

Yuki-onna appears on snowy nights as a tall, beautiful woman with long black hair and blue lips. Her inhumanly pale or even transparent skin makes her blend into the snowy landscape (as famously described in Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things). She sometimes wears a white kimono, but other legends describe her as nude, with only her face and hair standing out against the snow. Despite her inhuman beauty, her eyes can strike terror into mortals. She drifts over the snow, leaving no foot shaped impressions actually, a few stories say she has no feet, a characteristic of numerous Japanese apparitions), and she can convert into a billow of fog or snow if debilitated.

A few legends say the Yuki-onna, being connected with winter and snowstorms, is the spirit of somebody who died in the snow. She is in the meantime wonderful and tranquil, yet savage in killing clueless mortals. Until the eighteenth century, she was essentially uniformly depicted as malevolent. Today, in any case, stories frequently shade her as additional human, underscoring her apparition like nature and vaporous magnificence.

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In many stories, Yuki-onna appears to travellers trapped in snowstorms, and uses her icy breath to leave them as frost-coated corpses. Other legends say she leads them astray so they simply die of exposure. Other times, she manifests holding a child. When a well-intentioned soul takes the "child" from her, they are frozen in place. Parents searching for lost children are particularly susceptible to this tactic. Other legends make Yuki-onna much more aggressive. In these stories, she often invades homes, blowing in the door with a gust of wind to kill residents in their sleep (some legends require her to be invited inside first).

As the snow and winter climate she speaks to, Yuki-onna has a softer side. She now and again lets might be chumps strive for different explanations. In one prevalent Yuki-onna legend, for instance, she sets an adolescent kid free on account of his magnificence and age. She makes him make a guarantee to never to talk about her, yet sometime down the road, he recounts the story to his wife who uncovers herself to be the snow lady. She berates him for breaking his guarantee, however extras him once more, this time out of concern for their youngsters (yet assuming that he sets out abuse their kids, she will come back with no kindness. Fortunately for him, he is an adoring father). In a few forms, she picked not to murder him since he let her know, which she didn't treat as a broken guarantee (in fact, Yuki-Onna herself is not a human, and accordingly did not number). In a comparable legend, Yuki-onna liquefies away once her spouse reveals her accurate nature. On the other hand, she leaves to eternity a while later the same way.

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