Tag: yukionna

Yukionna (雪女, snow woman) is a spirit or youkai in Japanese folklore. She is a popular figure in Japanese literature, manga, and animation.
Yukionna is sometimes confused with Yama-uba ("mountain crone"), but they are not the same.

Yukionna appears on snowy nights as a tall, beautiful woman with long black hair and red lips. Her inhumanly pale or even transparent skin makes her blend into the snowy landscape (as famously described in Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things). She sometimes wears a white kimono, but other legends describe her as nude, with only her face and hair standing out against the snow.
Despite her inhuman beauty, her eyes can strike terror into mortals. She floats across the snow, leaving no footprints (in fact, some tales say she has no feet, a feature of many Japanese ghosts), and she can transform into a cloud of mist or snow if threatened.

In folklore, all yukionna are female, but in some works of fiction, there may be male counterparts.

Source: Wikipedia