Who Is O-Yuki (the Snow Woman) (Yuki-onna)?

Yuki-onna, the Snow Woman, is a Japanese yokai said to appear on snowy nights as a woman in white and freeze people to death. In "Yuki-Onna" from Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan, she later calls herself O-Yuki and becomes a human man's wife.

Two woodcutters from Musashi Province, Mosaku and Minokichi, take shelter from a blizzard in a ferryman's hut. That night the Snow Woman breathes her white breath on Mosaku and he freezes to death. She spares the young Minokichi because he is young and handsome, and warns him that if he ever tells anyone about this night, she will kill him. The next winter, a traveling girl named O-Yuki meets Minokichi and becomes his wife. She bears him ten children but never seems to grow older.

One night Minokichi tells her about that night long ago, and O-Yuki reveals: "It was I." She says she would have killed him if not for the children. She tells him to take good care of them, then melts into a white mist and vanishes. Hearn wrote that he heard this story from a farmer in Musashi Province.