Tsurara-onna

Under the eaves of a snow-country farmhouse the icicles grow all winter. The roof drips, freezes, drips again, and by January some of them have reached the ground and stand there like pillars propping the house up, thick as a man’s arm and faintly blue in the middle. A man living alone in such a house has a great deal of time to look at them. In the stories, he looks too long.

The wish is nearly always the same, and it is never a prayer. A young man in Aomori or Echigo is out under the eaves with a saw or an axe, cutting the ice back so he can get through his own door, and he says out loud that he would like a wife as beautiful and as white-skinned as this icicle. He is talking to himself, the way people do in February. That evening a woman comes up through the blowing snow and asks for shelter.

She is exactly what he asked for. In one telling from Ojiya in Niigata, collected in the 1950s from a farmer who hunted through the winters to make ends meet, she arrives in a blizzard wearing an okoso-zukin hood, about twenty years old, and the young man feels sorry enough for her to feed her a large supper. They sit at the sunken hearth and talk. The conversation gets round to the icicle he cut down that morning, the big one that formed in the same spot on his eaves every year and which he had grown fond of, and which had that morning grown clean across his doorway. Her face hardens. She asks him why he did it. He tells her about his sick old mother down in the village, and the hunting he has to do every day to keep them both fed, and that he had not wanted to cut it at all. Something in that answer changes her mind, and before the night is out she has asked to be his wife.

Whatever else happens, the marriage works for a while. She keeps the house. She is good company. She simply will not go near the bath, and on the coldest evenings she will not come close to the fire, and nobody in the story thinks hard enough about why.

The ending most often told is the plainest and the worst. Winter after winter she puts the bath off, and eventually her husband insists, either out of kindness or out of the ordinary domestic impatience of a man who cannot see the problem. She goes in. She does not come out. When he finally pushes the door open, the room is full of steam and there is nobody in it, only a few slivers of ice turning over in the hot water. In the Yamagata version she slips away to the kitchen during the wedding itself to warm the sake, and when the groom loses patience and goes to find her there is a soaked kimono on the floor by the fire and nothing inside it.

Akita tells it differently and more cruelly, because there is no wish involved at all. A woman knocks at a couple’s door on a night of heavy snow and asks to stay. They take her in gladly. The snow keeps falling and the roads stay shut and she stays on, and after some days her hosts do the decent thing and heat the bath for their guest. She refuses. They press her, meaning nothing but hospitality. She goes in looking miserable, and when they check on her there is no woman in the bathroom, only a single icicle hanging from the ceiling beam.

Then there are the tellings where she gets the last word. She vanishes with the spring thaw, the husband decides she has run off, and within the year he takes a second wife. The following winter she is back at the door. In one Echigo version she does not even need to speak: the man goes out to knock down a large icicle that is blocking the way, his new wife hears him scream, and she finds him outside in the snow with an icicle driven through his throat.

Her powers are almost embarrassingly limited, and that is the point of her. She can hold a human shape, keep a house, and pass entirely for a living woman for months at a stretch. Nothing in the tales gives her flight, or storms, or the freezing breath that the yuki-onna carries. The one thing she can do beyond looking human is what any icicle can do, which is to hang above a doorway and fall.

The limits are just as simple. She cannot survive warmth. A bath, a kitchen fire, a hearth on a cold night, the sun in March: all of these are the same threat wearing different clothes, and none of them can be argued with. She cannot explain herself either, or will not, which is why the disaster in these stories is always caused by an act of hospitality. Japanese folklorists file her among the supernatural wives, on the same shelf as the crane, the fox and the snake who marry men and are eventually found out, and the tale carries its own catalogue name, shigama-nyōbō, the icicle wife. Every one of those marriages ends the same way. This one just ends faster, and in front of a fire someone lit to be kind.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Tsurara-onna?

Tsurara-onna is an icicle that has taken the form of a beautiful young woman in Japanese folklore. She appears in the heavy-snow regions of Tōhoku and Niigata, usually after a lonely man wishes aloud for a wife as lovely and pale as the icicles on his roof. She lives as a human wife until heat destroys her.

How do you kill a Tsurara-onna?

Heat is the only thing that harms her, and it does so completely. A hot bath, a kitchen fire, or a hearth will melt her, and in most versions of the tale her husband causes her death without meaning to by insisting that she bathe. She also disappears on her own when the spring thaw arrives.

What is the difference between Tsurara-onna and Yuki-onna?

Tsurara-onna is an icicle in human form, while Yuki-onna is the snow woman who freezes travellers. They haunt the same snowbound regions in winter and are frequently confused with one another, but Tsurara-onna’s stories are domestic ones about marriage rather than encounters in a blizzard, and she has none of Yuki-onna’s freezing breath.

Is the Tsurara-onna dangerous?

Usually not. In most tellings she is a loving wife who is destroyed by her husband’s insistence on a bath, and she harms no one. In a smaller set of versions from Echigo she returns the winter after her disappearance, finds that her husband has remarried, and kills him with an icicle through the throat.

What are the other names for Tsurara-onna?

She is also called Tsurara-nyōbō or Shigama-nyōbō, both meaning “icicle wife”, and regional dialect gives her further names: Suga-jorō in Yamagata and Kanekkōri-nyōbō in the old province of Echigo, now Niigata. Each name is simply the local word for an icicle attached to the word for wife.

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