Episode Details

Two tales from Kwaidan. In Yuki-Onna, two woodcutters, Mosaku and Minokichi, are overtaken by a terrible snowstorm and take shelter in a ferryman's hut; in the night the boy wakes to find a woman all in white standing in the snow-light, who spares his life on one condition — that he never tell what he has seen. Years later, married to the gentle O-Yuki and father of ten children, he breaks the promise by a fireside, and learns who it was that spared him. In The Story of Aoyagi, the young samurai Tomotada, snowbound on a mission through Echizen, is sheltered by an old couple in a willow-shadowed cottage and falls in love with their daughter Aoyagi; carried off into the household of the great Lord Hosokawa, she is restored to Tomotada by the lord's own grace — but Aoyagi keeps a secret that no marriage can outlast, the secret of the willows.

Chapters:

0:05 Yuki-Onna

9:11 The Story of Aoyagi

From Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things by Lafcadio Hearn (1904), public domain — the ghost tales of Hearn's Japanese collections, told in his own order within each book, in Hearn's own prose, lightly modernized.

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