Jorogumo

What is a jorogumo?

The jorōgumo is a spider yokai that takes the shape of an attractive woman. In the stories, a man is approached by a stranger, often in a lonely house, at a waterfall or deep in the mountains, and drawn in by her charm or by a proposal of marriage; only later does he find the threads, the webs and, in the grimmest tales, the bodies of earlier victims. The jorogumo belongs to a large family of Japanese shapeshifting animals, but it is one of the few whose true form is an insect-like creature rather than a mammal.

The name is worth untangling. Spoken Japanese simply says jorōgumo, and the native spelling is 女郎蜘蛛, "young-woman spider" or "courtesan spider", where jorō is a word for a young woman or courtesan. The spelling 絡新婦, used by the Edo-period artist Toriyama Sekien and in many yokai books, is a different matter: it is a Chinese term borrowed for its meaning and given the Japanese reading, so its characters (roughly "entangling new bride") do not spell out the sounds of the word.

The same name belongs to a real animal. Jorōgumo is the ordinary Japanese name of Trichonephila clavata, a large orb-weaving spider found across much of East Asia, including Japan. The yokai and the spider share a name, but the folklore spider can be any size and is often imagined as a huge, ancient creature.

Appearance and powers

In human form the jorogumo is usually a young woman, sometimes an older woman acting on her daughter's behalf, and sometimes a woman carrying a baby. Her powers are those of a spider turned to deception: she can cast threads over a sleeping or resting person, bind them, and drag them away. Toriyama Sekien's print shows her as a spider-woman directing a swarm of small spiders that breathe fire, a picture of a creature that commands others of its kind.

Not every story is about seduction. Several of the best-known legends concern a spider that is the guardian, or nushi, of a waterfall or deep pool, a powerful being of the place that can be dangerous or protective depending on how it is treated.

Origins and history

The jorogumo comes into view in the tale collections of the Edo period (1603–1868), the great age of printed ghost stories. In Tonoigusa, compiled by Ogita Ansei, a young samurai meets a woman of about nineteen or twenty carrying a child. Sensing that she is not human, he cuts at her, and she escapes into the ceiling. The next day he finds a spider of one or two shaku (very roughly 30 to 60 centimetres) bearing his sword wound, surrounded by the remains of the many people it had killed.

The Taihei Hyakumonogatari, published in 1732, tells a quieter and stranger story. A man named Magoroku in Takada, in Mimasaka Province (today's Okayama Prefecture), is visited by a woman in her fifties who says her daughter of sixteen or seventeen wishes to marry him. When he refuses, the scene dissolves around him, and he finds under the eaves a small jorōgumo and a mass of webbing.

By the late eighteenth century the jorogumo was established enough for Sekien to include it in his illustrated yokai catalogues, the first of which, Gazu Hyakki Yagyō, appeared in 1776. His image and his choice of the 絡新婦 spelling have shaped how the creature has been drawn ever since.

Famous legends

Jōren Falls. The Jōren Falls (Jōren no taki) in the Amagi mountains of the Izu Peninsula, Shizuoka Prefecture, are said to be home to a jorōgumo who is the master of the falls. In the version recorded in the Shizuoka prefectural history, a farmer resting above the falls notices a spider winding its thread around his foot. He quietly moves the thread to a mulberry stump nearby; the ground shakes, and the stump is dragged into the falls. Other tellings give the story a human face: a woodcutter drops his axe into the pool, a beautiful woman returns it and tells him never to speak of what he has seen, and when he lets the secret slip he dies, in one version found lifeless in the pool the next day.

Kashikobuchi, Sendai. The same thread-and-stump trick appears in many places, and one of the best-known is Kashikobuchi, a pool on the Hirose River in Sendai. When the stump is pulled under, a voice from the water is said to call out "clever, clever" (kashikoi), which local tradition gives as the origin of the pool's name. Here the spider is honoured rather than feared: it is worshipped as a protector against drowning, and a stone inscribed to "the spirit of the spider" (妙法蜘蛛之霊) still stands at the site. A further local tale tells of an eel from the same pool who took the form of a woman and asked a man named Genbei to help her in a fight with the spider; he promised, then hid, and the eel lost.

Regional traditions and variants

Most traditional jorogumo stories are local legends attached to a particular waterfall, pool or house, rather than a single national story. The Nichibunken folklore database, which indexes reports from local histories and folklore journals, records the spider as the master of Jōren Falls; the Kashikobuchi legend belongs to Sendai; and the Edo tales place their spider-women in provincial towns. The jorogumo should not be confused with the tsuchigumo, a different spider yokai with its own history, best known from the tale of the warrior Minamoto no Raikō.

You may read online that a spider becomes a jorogumo when it reaches a certain great age. That idea is often repeated in English, but we have not been able to trace it to any premodern Japanese source, and the Edo-period tales above say nothing about it.

The real jorōgumo spider

The animal behind the name is a striking creature. Adult females measure roughly 17 to 30 millimetres in body length and are boldly marked, with a yellow abdomen banded in dark blue-green and touched with red, and long dark legs ringed with yellow; the males are far smaller and drab. Like other orb-weavers, they hang their prey in large wheel-shaped webs.

The species is not dangerous to people. Bites are unlikely, and its venom is not considered medically significant, with effects compared to a bee sting. So the folklore spider's appetite for travellers is pure legend. In recent years the jorōgumo has become newsworthy in the United States: it was first spotted in Georgia in 2013, confirmed there in 2014, and has since spread to other states, carrying with it the English common name "Joro spider", borrowed from the yokai.