SOURCE: Makino, Yoko. “Lafcadio Hearn's ‘Yuki-Onna’ and Baudelaire's ‘Les Bienfaits de la Lune.’” Comparative Literature Studies 28, no. 3 (summer 1991): 234-44.

In the following essay, Makino presents an analysis of Hearn's “Yuki-Onna,” noting its inspirational debt to one of Baudelaire's poems.

“Yuki-Onna” (“The Snow-Woman”) is one of the best known and popular stories of Lafcadio Hearn. Although included in Kwaidan (1904), a collection of Japanese weird tales completed in the year of his death, the story of “Yuki-Onna” is not only horrifying but also beautiful and fantastic.

Lord Sadanobu being stalked by a demon while on his way to see the emperor, from an early ghost story series called Wakan hyaku monogatari, (“One Hundred Ghost Stories of China and Japan.”)

While we have a definite original text for Hearn's other retold ghost stories, we have none for “Yuki-Onna.” In his foreword to Kwaidan, Hearn says that he developed the tale from...