Nure-onna

Also Known As: (濡女, “wet woman”); also nure-yomejo
Region/Culture: East Asia, Japanese
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A water creature with a woman’s head and the long body of a snake, whose hair is always soaking wet and whose tail is said to run for hundreds of metres.
Role in Mythos: In the Edo picture books she is one of the best-known faces of the riverside and the shore, and in living folklore along the Iwami coast she is the accomplice who holds a traveller still while something else does the killing.
Relation to Humans: She works by appearing harmless, a woman washing her hair or a woman needing help with a baby, and the danger begins only once a person has stopped walking. Local advice was practical rather than heroic: put gloves on before taking the bundle, and when the running starts, throw the gloves too.

The men on the drifting boat saw a woman at the water’s edge, washing her hair. Nothing in that should have frightened anyone. They rowed away screaming.

When the other boats caught up and asked whether they had seen a great snake, the answer was that it had been something worse than a snake. It had been a nure-onna, a wet woman. The men who did not believe them went upriver to look, and their voices carried back over the water several times before they stopped. Her tail was said to reach three chō, something over three hundred metres, so that being noticed at all was the end of the argument. None of them came back.

The picture is older and more famous than the story. Sawaki Suushi painted her into the Hyakkai Zukan in 1737, the illustrated bestiary now held at the Fukuoka City Museum, and Toriyama Sekien cut her into the second volume of his Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki in 1779, a copy of which sits in the British Museum. Both give the same figure: a woman’s face, black hair heavy and streaming, and below the shoulders a thick scaled coil that goes on and on. Some versions give her arms. Some do not, and those look less like a woman and more like a sea serpent that has grown a face. Her tongue is long and forked, and every telling agrees on the water running off her, which is where the name comes from and very nearly all the name means.

Here is the awkward part. For a creature this widely drawn, there is no Edo story about her. Murakami Kenji, whose dictionary of Japanese yokai is the standard reference, notes plainly that no classical text of the period carries a tale of a snake-bodied nure-onna at all. She was famous enough to paint and apparently not interesting enough to write down.

The Echigo tale that opens most modern accounts, the one with the boats on the border of what are now Niigata and Fukushima prefectures, comes from a book published in 1929 by the folklorist Fujisawa Morihiko. He presents it as an Edo incident and names no source for it, and the date he attaches to it does not survive checking: the era he gives and the year he gives are more than forty years apart. Later writers repeated the story without improving on it. Yamada Norio put it in a 1974 collection of Tōhoku ghost stories, Sasama Yoshihiko in a 1994 illustrated encyclopedia of Japanese cryptids, and neither cited anything earlier than themselves. Fujisawa has form here. He is the same writer who furnished the nuppeppo with a ruined temple to haunt.

What does have a genuine folk record is smaller, colder, and considerably nastier. In the Iwami region of Shimane Prefecture, the nureonna is not a solitary predator but a partner. The entry in the Sōgō Nihon Minzoku Goi, the lexicon of folklore terms compiled under Yanagita Kunio and published in 1955, gives her as the water-spirit used by the ushi-oni, the ox-headed demon of the western coasts.

She comes up the shingle with a baby in her arms and asks someone to hold it. Then she walks into the sea. The moment she is gone the ushi-oni comes out of the water, and the man on the beach discovers that the bundle in his arms has become a stone and that his hands will not open. The salt wind, the weight, the thing coming up the beach: that is the whole of it, and he does not get away. The countermeasure recorded alongside the legend is beautifully unromantic. Wear gloves before you take the child, and when you run, throw the gloves with it.

At Ōda, further along the same coast, a man who was handed the baby and somehow outran what followed heard the ushi-oni call after him as he went, saying what a shame, what a shame. He knew the voice. It was hers. The tradition there holds that the nure-onna and the ushi-oni are not two creatures but one wearing two shapes, which would make the woman on the beach not an accomplice but bait laid out by the thing that means to eat him.

Where she came from is unsettled. One reading, argued by the yokai researcher Tada Katsumi, makes her a transformed sea snake, which fits the armless versions and the coastal range. Another line of descent runs through the isoonna, the shore woman of Kyushu, a near neighbour said to drink the blood of anyone she meets, and it is from that association that the nure-onna acquired her own reputation for draining a pinned victim through that long tongue. The baby is her third inheritance. Handing a mortal an infant that turns to stone belongs properly to the ubume, the ghost of a woman dead in childbirth, and both creatures use the same mechanism: a bundle offered, a kindness accepted, and a weight that cannot be put down.

Her strengths follow from all of this. She is patient, she is unremarkable until she chooses not to be, and the water gives her both an approach and an exit. The length of her makes distance meaningless once she has been seen. Her limits follow just as neatly. Everything she does depends on someone stopping, looking, and reaching out, and she has no answer at all to a traveller who keeps walking. Gloves defeat her. So does simple rudeness. For a creature with a tail three hundred metres long, she is remarkably easy to refuse.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a nure-onna?

Nure-onna is a yokai of Japanese folklore with the head of a woman and the long body of a snake, whose hair is always soaking wet. She appears at coasts, riverbanks, and other water, and is most closely associated with Kyushu and the Shimane coast. Her name means “wet woman.”

What does the nure-onna do to people?

In the best-attested folk version, from the Iwami region of Shimane, she hands a passer-by a swaddled baby and walks into the sea, at which point an ushi-oni appears and the baby turns into a stone that cannot be dropped. In other accounts she pins a victim this way and drains their blood through a long serpentine tongue. A third strand of stories has her simply washing her hair and reacting violently to anyone who disturbs her.

How do you escape a nure-onna?

The traditional advice recorded in Shimane is to put gloves on before accepting the baby, and then to throw the bundle and the gloves together when running. Because everything she does depends on the victim stopping and taking the child, refusing the request works as well as anything.

Is the nure-onna related to the ushi-oni?

Yes. In the folklore of the Iwami region she acts as the ushi-oni’s accomplice, luring victims into place. Traditions at Ōda in Shimane go further and hold that she is the ushi-oni’s other form, after a man who escaped recognised her voice coming from the creature chasing him.

Where does the nure-onna come from in Japanese art?

She appears in the Hyakkai Zukan painted by Sawaki Suushi in 1737, held by the Fukuoka City Museum, and in the second volume of Toriyama Sekien’s Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki of 1779, part of the Gazu Hyakki Yagyō series. Despite how often she was drawn, no story about a snake-bodied nure-onna survives from the Edo period itself.