AniNovel › The works › Yuki-onna (The Snow Woman) Japanese
Lafcadio Hearn
1904 · 3,330 characters
Caught in a blizzard, two woodcutters shelter in a ferryman's hut. The younger, Minokichi, wakes to find a woman in white breathing over his sleeping companion. She spares him on one condition: that he never tell anyone what he saw. Years later, on an ordinary evening, he breaks his word.
The story is as Japanese as snow country gets, and it was written by a man born in Greece. Hearn collected it for Kwaidan in 1904, and the English you are reading here is closer to the source than the Japanese is.
Source: The English text here is Hearn's own, from Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904) — not a translation back from the Japanese. The Japanese text on this site is Ryūji Tabe's 1937 translation, from Aozora Bunko, whose colophon is on the Japanese page. The copyright on this work has expired.
The narration is synthesized speech, not a recording by a voice actor.