Jorōgumo

A spider that lives four hundred years becomes a woman.

Not a disguise exactly — a genuine second form, beautiful, and used the way the web was used before: for catching things. The jorōgumo hunts men with intimacy instead of silk, though the silk is still there, and it's usually around your ankle before you notice.

The name is a filthy joke, cleaned up

The folk name for her was blunt: 女郎蜘蛛, roughly "whore spider."

Sekien wrote it differently. He chose the characters 絡新婦, which read as "entangling newlywed woman" — same pronunciation, entirely different register, and a much better creature.

That's a small masterpiece of catalog editing. He took a crude street name, kept the sound exactly, and swapped the meaning into something that describes what she actually does. The pun institutionalized the monster.

And it's still in circulation. The real orb-weaver Trichonephila clavata — the big gold-and-black spider you cannot avoid in a Japanese garden in autumn, sitting in an enormous web — is called the Jorō spider, in scientific usage, in English, today. It has recently been spreading across the southeastern United States, which means a fair number of Americans now have a four-hundred-year-old Japanese seductress in the yard.

The falls

Her signature tradition is at Jōren Falls, in Izu, and it comes in two versions that pull in different directions.

The secret. A woodcutter drops his axe into the basin under the falls. A beautiful woman surfaces and returns it to him — on one condition: tell no one.

He keeps it. For years. And then, at a banquet, with drink in him, he tells the story.

He never woke again.

That's the broken-taboo engine, and it's the same one that drives the snow-woman's tale: a supernatural woman gives you something on a single condition, you keep it faithfully for a long time, and you break it in an ordinary moment of warmth and company. Not under torture. At a party.

The threads. In the other version, silk loops quietly around the woodcutter's foot while he rests by the water. He notices, and slips the threads off onto a tree stump instead.

The stump is ripped out of the ground and dragged into the falls.

He gets away — and a travelling priest later dissolves her threads with a sutra — and then the woodcutter, who has not stopped thinking about her, goes back to the water on his own.

He vanishes into it, entangled in silk.

Which is the harder ending of the two, because nothing caught him. He was warned, saved, released, and he went anyway.

The fire-breathing children

One detail from the Edo tale collections deserves keeping, because it is genuinely strange and it doesn't fit the seduction story at all.

Sekien paints her leading the second volume of his first catalog, and the accompanying tradition has her manipulating small fire-breathing spiders — sending out offspring that spit flame.

So underneath the woman at the falls there's an older, less elegant creature: a spider matriarch with a brood, using them as weapons.

The catalogs kept both. The beautiful one is the one that survived.