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Jorō-Gumo (女郎蜘蛛 Jorō-Gumo, meaning Woman Spider) is a spider yōkai.
Appearance[]
Personality[]
History[]
The Great Yōkai War[]
Powers and Abilities[]
Transformation:
Thread:
Legend[]
The Jorō-Gumo is a well-known yōkai, resembling a beautiful woman at first glance, her true form is a monstrous man-eating spider. Jorō-Gumo is the Japanese word for a species of golden orb weaver, so it's said that when an orb-weaver turns 400 years old, it becomes a Jorō-Gumo.
Common legends of the Jorō-Gumo involve a traveler or a fisherman standing near the river, while a spider would come along and put a thread on the traveler's leg undetected before leaving. When they noticed the thread, they would untie it from their leg and wrap it around a nearby plant. After a while, the plant was uprooted and pulled into the river.
Once a woodsman from another country accidentally drops his machete into the basin of a waterfall. When the woodsman crawled into the basin of the waterfall to look for the hatchet, a beautiful woman brought it to him and revealed that she was a Jorō-Gumo, saying that she would give him back the hatched if he promised he wouldn't let anyone know of her existence. Later, the woodsman accidentally spoke of his encounter with Jorō-Gumo and died later that night.
In a story from the Taihei Hyakumonogatari, while a samurai named Magoroku was sleeping in his house, an old woman came to him and told him that her daughter adored him as he was taken to a large mansion. There he meets a beautiful woman who asked Magoroku to marry her. Magoroku refused her offer as he already had a wife. Then, the mansion disappeared and he found himself back in his house. Magoroku realized that a Jorō-Gumo disguised himself as a woman and tried to seduce him while in his dream, so he ordered his servant to remove spider webs from all over the house, and nothing strange ever happened after that.
Trivia[]
Etymology[]
- Jorō (女郎) was once a slang term meaning girl or woman. However, starting in the Edo period, it was used as a term for prostitutes.