Jorogumo

Jorogumo is a spider yokai of Japanese folklore, a spider that takes the form of a beautiful woman. In the stories she lives by rivers, waterfalls and lonely houses, and the men she draws in are caught in her threads.

Jorōgumo in Japanese: 絡新婦 and 女郎蜘蛛

The name is written two ways. 女郎蜘蛛 is the everyday name of the joro spider. 絡新婦, roughly a bride who entangles, is the spelling used for the yokai.

絡 (raku): to entwine, to entangle.
新 (shin): new.
婦 (fu): woman, bride.

Read together, the characters mean something like “the entangling new bride.” Read aloud, they are still jorōgumo, so the name sounds the same however it is written.

The more common spelling is 女郎蜘蛛. 女郎 (jorō) is an old word for a young woman, used in Edo Japan for courtesans, and 蜘蛛 (kumo) means spider, softening to gumo inside a word.

The spider at the waterfall

The best-known jorogumo legend comes from Jōren Falls, on the Izu Peninsula. A man resting beside the pool felt fine threads wrap around his ankle. He unwound them and tied them to a tree stump instead. A moment later the stump was torn from the ground and dragged into the water.

Folklore held that a spider that lived long enough, four hundred years in many tellings, gained the power to change its shape. Toriyama Sekien drew her in his Edo period catalogues of yokai, and his image helped fix how she is pictured.

The joro spider

Jorōgumo is also the everyday Japanese name of a real spider, Trichonephila clavata, a golden orb-weaver native to East Asia. It reached Georgia in the mid-2010s and has spread across much of the Southeast, the Carolinas included, where it is known by a shortened form of its Japanese name, the joro spider.

The females are large, yellow and blue-black, and spin wide golden webs that are most visible in early autumn. Despite their size, they are considered harmless to people.

The design

The Jorogumo Tee draws her caught between her two forms: a woman in a kimono, with a spider’s legs spreading from her back. Her name, 絡新婦, is printed with her.