Jorōgumo (絡新婦): The Spider of Jōren Falls

What is Jorōgumo?

A young man sat down to rest beside Jōren Falls, in the mountains of Izu. A jorōgumo came out and began winding its thread around his foot. He noticed, slipped the thread off, and looped it round a mulberry stump nearby. A little later the stump was wrenched out of the ground and fell into the basin of the falls.

That is how it was told in 1934, and it is the whole encounter. No giant spider, no woman, no fangs. A thread fine enough to overlook, and strong enough to show what would have happened if it had stayed on his ankle.

What does jorōgumo mean?

The name is written two ways. 女郎蜘蛛 is jorō, a courtesan, and kumo, a spider — “the courtesan spider,” and it is also the everyday name of a real animal, the large golden orb-weaver that strings its webs across Japanese gardens every autumn. 絡新婦 is a different reading of the same sounds: karamu, to entangle, and shinpu, a bride. The entangling bride.

Both names put a woman in the word. The stories at Jōren Falls, for most of their history, did not.

The master of the falls

In Amagi Yugashima, where Jōren Falls drops into its pool, the master of the falls was said to be the jorōgumo. In the telling set down in 1989, a farmer rested at the top of the falls and the spider wound its thread round his leg; he hung the thread on a cut mulberry stump, the earth shook, and the stump was swallowed by the falls.

In 1990 the story had grown a second half. Years after the stump went into the water, the farmer’s heir dropped an axe into the pool. The spirit of the jorōgumo came up in the form of a beautiful woman and gave it back — and when he told other people what he had seen, he lost his life.

That is where the woman enters: late, at the bottom of the pool, holding an axe, and dangerous only to a man who could not keep a secret.

Appearance

In the thread-and-stump story the jorōgumo is a spider. A small one, by implication — small enough to wind a thread round a foot without the man noticing. The pool it serves is the thing with the strength.

Our illustration keeps the spider small and dark, the thread fine, and the falls doing the pulling. The woman belongs to the later story and does not appear in the earlier one, and the modern design — a human torso on eight legs — belongs to neither.

Behavior and abilities

• It works quietly. The thread goes on while the man rests; he discovers it only by looking down.
• The pull is enormous. Moved to a stump, the thread tears it out of the earth and into the water.
• It keeps the falls. The jorōgumo is the master of Jōren, and the pool is its reach.
• Later, it returns what falls in. As a woman, in exchange for silence.

Weaknesses and countermeasures

The man at the falls survives by taking the thread off his foot and putting it on something else. That is not a weakness of the spider; the pull continues, and the stump pays for it. It is a redirection, and it belongs to this story. The heir who got his axe back had a different rule to keep, and did not keep it.

Documented tradition and later imagery

Documented tradition. At Jōren Falls in Izu: a spider that winds its thread around a resting man’s foot; the thread moved to a mulberry stump; the stump torn out and swallowed by the falls (1934; 1989); and a later sequel in which the spirit of the falls, as a beautiful woman, returns a dropped axe to the man’s heir, who dies after telling of it (1990).

Later imagery. Fiction, games, and illustration have made the jorōgumo a seductive woman with a spider’s body who lures men to a web-filled lair and eats them. That figure draws on other old tales of spiders that became women, and it has crowded out the small spider by the waterfall it descends from.

The thread is still the frightening part. You are resting by the water. You look down, and something has been quietly tying you to the pool.