The Snow Woman
1968 Japanese film
The Snow Woman (Japanese: 怪談雪女郎, Hepburn: Kaidan Yukijorō; lit. 'Ghost Story of the Snow Woman') is a 1968 Japanese fantasy horror film directed by Tokuzō Tanaka and produced by Daiei Film. The film is an expanded adaptation of the Yuki-onna short story as it appeared in the 1904 collection Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things by Lafcadio Hearn.
Plot
The film opens on two sculptors walking through a snow-covered forest during the Edo period. The men find a large tree that the elder master wants to cut down and carve into a statue of the Buddhist goddess Kannon. A blizzard begins, and the men shelter in an abandoned cottage. While sleeping, a woman enters the cottage and freezes the master to death. She spares the younger apprentice (Yosaku), making him promise to not tell anyone what he saw or she will kill him.
Later, Yosaku is living with the old master's widow. The large tree is cut down and brought to the village. Yosaku is instructed to carve the statue that the old master would have wanted, which is to be placed in the temple.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Snow Woman” is 1968 Japanese film. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Snow, Woman and Japanese, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “1968 Japanese film” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q107694531. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1968 and 1904.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Snow Woman” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.