This is an evocative, full-length telling of the legend recounted in Kobayashi's Kwaidan, of the Snow Woman who freezes the life out of those she meets in the icy mountain regions where she wanders, awash in deadly snowflakes. In this fleshed out version, the story becomes, like Mizoguchi's Ugetsu, a meditation on the nature of art, inspiration and the supernatural; it is also a tragic story of ill-fated lovers in the mortal world. The woodcarver Yosaku is spared by the Snow Woman because of his good looks on condition that he reveal their meeting to no one. Years later, he marries a pale beauty, Yuki (Snow); they live happily with their little boy, the artist at work on an iconic image of the Buddhist goddess of mercy, for whom his wife is to be the model. Their home is a simple sanctuary from the brutal politics around them, but it is not to last. A slip of the tongue and Yuki must return to her natural state--that of the Yuki-Onna (Snow Woman). The inevitability of her transformation, and her last vestiges of human sorrow, are reminiscent of the haunting Yoshitoshi woodcut, "Fox Woman Leaving Her Child." Chishi Makimura's textural cinematography captures abstract planes of ice at the Snow Woman's touch; a forest of rain; and the sad, warm woods of art and contentment.