Jorogumo

Above the falls at Jōren, in the hills of Izu, a farmer lay down in the wet noise and let the cold off the water settle on him. He felt the thread go round his ankle the way you feel a hair, which is to say not much, and he was awake enough to be curious rather than frightened. So he worked the loop free and carried it a few steps and hitched it instead around a mulberry stump. The ground shook. The stump came out of the earth roots and all and went into the pool, and the pool closed over it, and the man went home.

He had met the nushi, the owner of the water. The Shizuoka prefectural folklorists collected that story twice over from the Amagi valley and printed it flat, without wonder, as the sort of thing the district knew: the master of Jōren Falls is a jorōgumo. The same tale is recorded at a pool on the Hirose River in Sendai, where the decoy was a willow and a voice came up out of the water afterwards saying clever, clever, and that is where the place got its name, Kashikobuchi, the clever deep. It is told in Chichibu, where the stump came up to a grunt of yoisho. It is told at Maeda Falls in Fukushima, where the laugh from the bottom was a flat ahahaha, as though the thing down there had only just worked out it was hauling on a tree root. On Mount Tatsugane in Miyagi the spider took a woodcutter’s clothes instead, and the waterfall has been called Kumo-daki, Spider Falls, ever since. At a pool in the Nagano highlands the villagers gave up on cleverness and buried a sutra.

The name is older than any of it and belongs first to an ordinary animal. Jorōgumo is what Japanese has called the golden orb-weaver since at least 1666, when it appears in the illustrated lexicon Kinmō Zui: a spider whose female runs to twenty-five millimetres against her mate’s seven, yellow above with green-blue bands, a patch of true red on the body wall behind, legs ringed black and gold, hanging a big triple-layered net between trees near houses in the late warmth of the year. Whether the jorō in the name is the courtesan or the court lady is still argued. What is certain is that the traffic ran from spider to woman before it ran the other way, because by 1682 Saikaku could have a character in Life of an Amorous Man cry out that a jorōgumo has got hold of him and expect the joke to land. The writing 絡新婦, the one that gets translated as entangling newlywed, is a Chinese term pinned onto the Japanese word much later for the look of the thing. It is a pun made by scribes, not an etymology, and it has been doing far too much work in English ever since.

The oldest story is a night in a ruined shrine. Ogita Ansei put it at the head of the second book of his Tonoigusa in 1677 and gave it a title that is also the moral: even in a hurry, think. A young retainer is caught out after dark too far from any village, finds an old shrine in a wood, and climbs onto the worship hall to sit out the night against a pillar. The vermilion of the fence has gone under moss. The paper streamers have blown off and are rotting in the low grass. No bells, no prayers, autumn insects answering the wind in the sakaki, and cobwebs strung along the wall arguing with the kudzu coming in from the yard. At the fourth watch a woman of nineteen or twenty is suddenly there with an infant on her hip. He decides at once that nothing human is out here at this hour and keeps his hand where it is. She smiles and tells the baby that the man is its father and to go and be held. The child comes at a scurry; he puts his hand to his sword and stares it down, and it runs back to her. She sends it again. He stares it down again. Four or five times, and then she loses patience, says that in that case she will come herself, and walks at him without a word of greeting, and he cuts her open on the draw. She says ah, goes up the wall, and disappears into the ceiling.

At first light he climbs the beams and looks in. A jorōgumo with claw tips two shaku long lies there split from the head down the back, and the ceiling is crowded with human dead. He climbs down and looks at what the child had been. A weathered five-ring stone stupa, tipped in the grass. If he had struck at it, the text says, the finest blade ever forged would have snapped or turned, and that is the moment she was waiting for. The child was a rock. The whole trap was built on a man being frightened enough to swing first.

The other Edo account, from the Taihei Hyaku Monogatari of 1732, is the strange one, because nobody dies. A man named Magoroku is dozing on his veranda in Takata in Sakushū one summer when a woman in her fifties turns up to say her daughter is in love with him, and takes him to a house he has never seen. A girl of sixteen or seventeen asks him to marry her. He says he already has a wife. She holds on and argues, and her argument is a grievance: her mother came to him even though he nearly killed her only the day before yesterday, and he is going to waste all that feeling. He bolts, and the house comes apart as he runs, and he is back on his own veranda, and his wife tells him he has not moved all afternoon. Then he notices a small jorōgumo under the eaves in a web packed tight, and remembers chasing a spider off two days earlier. He had the webs cleared away and was not bothered again.

Toriyama Sekien put her in the Gazu Hyakki Yagyō in 1776 as a woman’s body carried on spider legs, with a scatter of small spiders breathing fire around her, and that picture has done more for her reputation than any of the texts. It is worth knowing what the book actually gives: a drawing and a name, one creature to a page, and no explanation at all. The commentaries come in his later collections.

Which leaves the version most English readers have, the beauty in the lonely house who plays the biwa until the traveller stops noticing the thread, then eats him. In 2008 a reader asked a university library in Kyoto to find the Edo source for exactly that story. The librarians went through both Edo texts in their own stacks, the Shizuoka volumes, the Nichibun folklore database, four encyclopaedias of legend, the tale-type indexes, and finally wrote to the folklore institute itself, and reported back that they could not find it. What they did find, in the type indexes, was a northern folktale about a spider woman in a mountain temple who plays a shamisen, or a biwa if the player is a blind man, and loops a thread around the listener’s neck at every stroke. In that story the man kills the spider.

Her powers are all of one kind. She can put out a line so fine that a waking man mistakes it for his own hair and so strong that it takes a mulberry tree out of the ground. She can wear a woman, a mother, a whole house and an afternoon. She can hold a stretch of water and be its owner. Her weaknesses are the same list read backwards, because not one of these accounts has her overpower anybody. She needs the traveller to swing at the stone, or the sleeper to stay asleep, or the woodcutter to keep coming back. A wary man, a swept eave, a shouted sutra, a buried scripture, and she is finished. And she cannot tell the difference between a man and a tree stump once the thread is on it, which is why she is remembered at all: every one of those pools is named for the day she pulled with everything she had and brought up wood.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Jorogumo in Japanese folklore?

A jorogumo is a spider yōkai of Japanese folklore that takes the form of a woman. In the regional field records she is the nushi, the owning spirit of a waterfall pool, who lays thread on a resting man and tries to drag him in; in the Edo story collections she appears as a woman with a child or a marriage offer. The name is also the ordinary Japanese word for the golden orb-weaver spider.

What is the oldest written story about the Jorogumo?

The oldest is in Ogita Ansei’s Tonoigusa of 1677, where a young samurai spends the night in a ruined shrine and is approached by a woman carrying an infant who tells the child to go to its father. He refuses to strike at the child, cuts the woman instead, and at dawn finds a huge dead spider in the ceiling among human remains, while the infant turns out to have been a weathered stone stupa.

Does the Jorogumo lure men with music?

Not in any Edo text that has been traced. When a Japanese university library was asked in 2008 to find the source for the famous story of a beautiful spider woman who plays the biwa and then devours her listener, it searched the primary collections, the folklore databases and the tale-type indexes and could not find it. The nearest real tradition is a northern folktale in which a spider woman plays a shamisen and the man kills her.

Why is there a shrine to a Jorogumo at Kashikobuchi?

At Kashikobuchi on the Hirose River in Sendai, the jorogumo tried to drag a fisherman into the pool with her thread, and he shifted it to a willow, which was torn out and pulled under while a voice said “clever, clever.” The pool took its name from that cry, and the spider was afterwards worshipped there as a guardian against drowning. A stone inscribed with “the spirit of the dharma spider” and a small torii still stand at the site.

How does the Jorogumo kill?

She never kills by strength. In every surviving account she depends on the victim making a mistake: striking at a decoy, staying asleep, keeping a promise badly, or returning to the water again and again. Awareness defeats her, and so do a shouted sutra and a cleared cobweb, which is why the men who get away are the ones who stop to think.

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