Jorōgumo

The waterfall at Jōren throws up a fine cold mist that never quite settles, and a man who lies down to rest in it wakes with his clothes damp and his skin prickling. One woodcutter woke to something else. A thread lay looped around his ankle, thin as a hair and strong as cord, and when he worked it loose and knotted it instead around the stump of a felled tree, the stump tore free of the earth and shot into the pool as if a great hand below the surface had yanked the line. From the water a voice came, soft and pleased with itself: how clever, how clever. He did not go back to sleep.

That voice belonged to a jorōgumo, the spider that wears a woman. She begins as an ordinary golden orb-weaver, the kind whose webs hang in the late-summer gardens of Japan and catch the light like strung brass wire. The trouble starts when one of them lives too long. At four hundred years, the stories say, the spider crosses some threshold of age into magic, and with the magic comes appetite and the means to feed it. She learns to fold her many legs down into two arms and two legs, to draw a human face over her own, and to walk into a town looking like the most beautiful woman anyone there has seen.

Her method rarely changes. A traveller hears music before he sees her, the clear plucked notes of a biwa drifting from a house he does not remember passing. Inside is a woman alone, gracious and lovely and glad of company. She offers him shelter and her affection, and he takes both. What he does not notice is how tired he feels the next morning, and the morning after that, and how the beautiful house has rather a lot of cobwebs in its corners. By the time a man understands what is happening to him he is usually too weak to leave. The silk has been going around him the whole while, one strand at a time, as he thought he was being loved.

In her true shape she is enormous, a spider the size of a grown person or larger, and Japanese artists have never quite agreed on how much woman to leave in her. Some give a giant spider a woman’s head; others show a woman whose lower body swells into a bulbous abdomen and a crown of bristling legs. The eighteenth-century artist Toriyama Sekien painted the most theatrical version, a spider-woman ringed by small spiders that breathe fire and scuttle at her command, her nature only half concealed behind human grace. The characters chosen to write her name mean entangling newlywed woman, and the pun turns cruel there, because the entangling is not a figure of speech.

The name carries a second, older reading that is blunter still. Written another way, jorō means a prostitute, and the creature was understood as a spider dressed as a courtesan, offering the promise of intimacy and collecting a body in place of a fee. Yet not every account makes her a killer. At Jōren Falls she is also remembered as the mistress of the water itself, a spirit who keeps people from drowning, and at the pool called Kashikobuchi villagers raised small torii and stone markers to the spirit of the spider and prayed to her for protection against flood. The same being who drags a sleeping man toward the pool in one story is asked for safety from that same water in the next. The folklore does not resolve the contradiction. It simply holds both.

The fullest version of the Jōren tale is a slow one. A young woodcutter meets a woman by the falls and loses his heart to her, and he goes back to her every day. Each visit leaves him a little more hollow, his strength running out of him like water down the rock, until the priest of a nearby temple takes one look at him and understands. The man has been taken in by the jorōgumo of the waterfall. The priest goes with him and chants a sutra, and the recited scripture does what a strong young arm could not. In some tellings the spell breaks and the woodcutter is saved; in others he walks to the water one last time and is never seen again. The stories that let him live and the stories that let him drown are told by the same people with equal conviction.

Her powers are patience and disguise. She spins silk strong enough to hold a grown man however he strains against it, and her venom does not kill quickly. It wastes a victim over days, so that she can keep him and feed at leisure rather than end the meal at once. Her change into a woman is seamless enough to fool a whole village, and the music is part of the snare rather than an ornament to it. Against all of this she carries a few real weaknesses. She depends entirely on deception, so a wary guest, a priest who reads the signs, or a chanted sutra can unpick her whole design. She works alone, by night, in isolated places, because crowds and daylight and clear-headed people are precisely what she cannot survive. And beneath the borrowed face she remains an animal that can be cut and killed. The thread that binds a man can be cut as well, as the woodcutter at Kashikobuchi found, though cutting it only taught him how strong the thing on the other end really was.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Jorōgumo in Japanese folklore?

A jorōgumo is a shapeshifting spider yōkai from Japanese folklore, a giant orb-weaver that gains magical powers after living for centuries and can disguise itself as a beautiful woman. In human form it lures men into its home, binds them in silk, and slowly drains them.

How does a spider become a Jorōgumo?

According to legend, a golden orb-weaver spider becomes a jorōgumo when it reaches roughly 400 years of age, at which point it gains the ability to shapeshift into human form and an appetite for human prey. Its name is written with characters meaning “entangling newlywed woman,” while an older reading, “whore spider,” reflects its disguise as a seductive courtesan.

How does the Jorōgumo kill its victims?

The jorōgumo lures a man with her beauty and with biwa music, offers him affection, and wraps him in silk so strong he cannot escape. Her venom works slowly, weakening the victim over days so that the spider can feed at leisure rather than killing him at once.

Is the Jorōgumo always evil?

Not in every story. While most tales cast the jorōgumo as a deadly seductress, at Jōren Falls in Izu she is also remembered as a guardian of the waterfall who protects people from drowning, and shrines and torii at Kashikobuchi honored her spirit as a ward against flooding.

What is the legend of Kashikobuchi?

In the Kashikobuchi legend, a man resting beside a waterfall found his feet bound with spider threads; he cut them loose and tied them to a tree stump, which was instantly ripped from the ground and dragged into the pool. A voice from the water said “how clever, how clever” (kashikoi), giving the place its name, which means “clever abyss.”

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