Yurei Attack!: The Japanese Ghost Survival Guide
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4. Dangling hands.
Don’t let the limp wrists fool you. They aren’t an indication of weakness, but rather a signal that you’re dealing with the dead.
5. White kimono.
The kimono of the dead are folded in the opposite manner of that of living people. (For example, the usual left-over-right lapel style would be right-over-left for a body at a funeral.)
6. Hitodama.
Although literally translated as “human souls,” these weird fireballs are generally considered manifestations of ghostly phenomena rather than actual spirits. They are commonly seen alongside yurei.
7. Lack of feet.
The absence of a physical connection to the ground is a hallmark yurei characteristic.
CHAPTER ONE
Sexy & Scary
OIWA
OKIKU
OTSUYU
LADY ROKUJO
ISORA
ORUI
Some of the Japan’s most famous ghosts are women. These ladies put the “fatale” in “femme fatale.”
Sexy & Scary: 01
OIWA
Sexy & Scary: 01
OIWA
Name in Japanese: 於岩
Origin: Yotsuya Kaidan (The Horror of Yotsuya)
Gender: Female
Date of Death: 1636
Age at death: Early 20s (Estimated)
Cause of death: Suicide
Type of ghost: Onryo
Distinctive features: Right side of face horribly scarred; Bald spots, with hair falling out in clumps; Occasionally portrayed as having one eye
Place of internment: Myogyo-ji Cemetery, Tokyo
Location of haunting: Tokyo
Form of Attack: Constant manifestations. Provocation of injuries similar to her own.
Existence: Based in part on a true story
Threat Level: Extremely High
Claim to Fame
Hands down the single most famous ghost chronicled in the pages of this book. A supernatural superstar for well over a century, she has inspired legions of imitators — most recently Sadako, from the hit J-Horror novel and film series “Ring.” Without a doubt, Oiwa's ragged tresses and ruined face are the first thing many Japanese think of when they hear the word “yurei.”
The Story
Coherent English summaries of Oiwa’s story are few and far between. Read on and you’ll understand why. Her most famous turn, the 1825 kabuki “Tokaido Yotsuka Kaidan,” packs more twists into a few hours than a modern TV miniseries does into an entire season.
Oiwa is married to Iyemon, a disgraced samurai. After the couple has yet another row, Oiwa’s father takes her home. Iyemon sets up a private meeting to beg for forgiveness, but Oiwa’s father reveals proof that Iyemon stole money from his former government job. Enraged, Iyemon stabs Oiwa’s father to death.
Oiwa’s sister Osode is happily married to a loyal man named Yomoshichi. But Naosuke, the neighborhood medicine peddler, carries a torch for her. In a coincidence of the sort that only happens in kabuki, Naosuke picks this very night to murder his rival. (Getting all this?)
When Oiwa and Osode stumble on the respective scenes, Iyemon and Naosuke convince the two that the victims were killed in robberies. They console the ladies by promising they’ll get their revenge on whatever villains perpetrated these foul deeds. And so life goes on, with Iyemon and Oiwa reunited, and Osode and Naosuke able to court Osode.
But fickle, philandering Iyemon quickly loses interest in Oiwa after she gives birth to their child, and begins focusing his amorous attentions on Ume, the daughter of a high-ranking government official. Frustrated by his marital status, Iyemon bribes a masseuse to seduce his wife in an attempt to trump up grounds for divorce.
Meanwhile, Ume takes matters into her own hands by sending Oiwa a little baby-shower gift: a powerful poison disguised as a medicinal cream.
The poison does its job: the skin sloughs off Oiwa’s face and her hair pulls out in clumps, leaving her horribly disfigured. The masseuse can’t bring himself to carry out the deed, and blows the lid off of Ieymon’s intrigue as Oiwa gazes upon her ruined face in a mirror.
She commits suicide while coldly proclaiming a curse on the soul of the man who’d wronged her. Iyemon responds by nailing her corpse and that of a lawman (who he also kills after the man comes sniffing around about a certain vial of missing poison) to a door, and hurls them into the Kanda River to make it seem as if the pair had died in a love-suicide.
The Attack
Things take a turn from “soap opera” to “spooky” on Iyemon and Ume’s wedding night, when Oiwa’s furious apparition manifests in the conjugal suite, causing Iyemon to lash out wildly and accidentally kill his bride. In the hallway another appearance causes him to mistakenly cut down her father. Pursued by the remainder of the household, he hurls Ume’s mother and her servant into a canal, where both drown.
Iyemon doing his thing, on the cover of the program from a 1925 Kabuki production of “Yotsuya Kaidan”
Meanwhile, Naosuke finally gets his wish when Osode agrees to sleep with him. But the minute the pair bed down, Yomoshichi’s ghost appears in the room. Naosuke wrestles with the phantom intruder, accidentally killing Osode in the melee. And in yet another twist, it turns out that she was none other than his long-lost sister! Shocked (and presumably grossed out), Naosuke commits suicide.
Iyemon continues to be confronted by the deformed visage of his dead wife; she appears everywhere, even in the form of the paper lanterns swinging over his head. On the run and destitute, he attempts fishing for some food, only to hook the door he’d thrown in the river earlier, still festooned with the now horribly rotting corpses of his victims. Ghostly voices fill his ears as he runs far, far from the city to an isolated cottage on the ominously named Snake Mountain. Still he is unable to escape. Oiwa’s face haunts him from the windows, walls, floor, even the trees and vines outside. He tries committing suicide, but her phantom hand stays his blade again and again.
Iyemon, by this point a total gibbering wreck, finally gets a lucky break when Yomoshichi pops up and puts him out of his misery. Making this one beautiful happy ending... If you’re an angry ghost, anyway.
Surviving an Encounter
You’re in big, big trouble if Oiwa is on your case. In spite of the fact that she is ostensibly a fictional character, she is believed to be as potent and dangerous a force today as when she first manifested. But you can content yourself with the fact that Oiwa doesn’t want her victims dead — she just wants to make their lives a living hell.
Unconfirmed stories abound of those who become involved with her story being injured — often those who portray her in kabuki productions, but the cast and crews of television and film as well. For this reason, it is customary for anyone involved in a production of Yotsuya Kaidan to visit Oiwa’s grave, at Myogyo-ji temple in the Sugamo district of Tokyo, to show their respects.
Want a little extra insurance? No problem. Visit the Tamiya Shrine, which is located on the site of Oiwa’s family home in Yotsuya. For a fee, the priest there will perform a custom-tailored Shinto exorcism ceremony to cut any ties one might have to Oiwa’s eternally furious spirit*.
Analysis
In creating his portrayal of Oiwa for the 1825 kabuki production of Yotsuya Kaidan, the playwright Tsuruya Nanboku IV synthesized elements from several real-life murder cases (one of which really did involve a samurai nailing his wife and her lover to a door!)
Within the next few years, five people associated with the play would die under mysterious circumstances—including Nanboku. Curse of coincidence? You make the call.
Know Your Lantern
Oiwa’s manifestation as a lantern is often mistaken for the very similar-looking yokai known as bura-bura or baké-chochin (see Yokai Attack!). The key to telling the difference: look for hair. Yokai lanterns tend not to have any.
Hokusai’s famous rendering of Oiwa, is often mistaken for a Bura-Bura haunted lantern. 1831 woodblock print.
* Don't worry: We went ahead and did this. (Really!) - Hiroko and Matt.
Sexy & Scary: 02
OKIKU
Sexy & Scary: 02
OKIKU
Name in Japanese: お菊
Origin: “Bancho Sara-yashiki” (The Plate Mansion of Bancho”), 1741
A.K.A: The Plate-Counting Ghost
Gender: Female
Date of Death: Various. Early 1500s? Mid 1600s?
Age at death: Early 20s (Estimated)
Cause of death: Murder
Type of Ghost: Onryo
Distinctive features: Apparently normal-looking young woman; Voice/apparition manifests from a well
Location of haunting: Various, including Himeji and Edo
Form of Attack: Incessant counting
Existence: Fictional. We think
Threat Level: Low
Claim To Fame
Wells, particularly abandoned ones, are considered scary sorts of places all over the world—they’re dark, they’re dank, they’re deep, they’re potentially filled with who-only-knows-what sorts of creepy crawlies. But they enjoy a special sort of significance in Japanese tales of terror. Even modern-day fare such as Koji Suzuki’s Ring or Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle portray wells as channels of supernatural activity. While the story you are about to read certainly isn’t the first example of a haunted well in Japanese folklore, it is undoubtedly the most well known.
The Story
Long ago in the province of Harima, there was a beautiful woman by the name of Okiku. She worked as a maidservant for a samurai by the name of Aoyama Tessan, a vassal of the family that ruled the province from their seat of power in Himeji Castle. Tessan dreamed of ruling the province himself, and hatched a scheme to poison the lord of the castle at a party. But word of the plan leaked to its intended target, forcing Tessan to abandon the plot.
While nobody suspected Tessan’s role, the lord knew there must be a traitor nearby. So he ordered his right-hand man, Danshiro, to uncover the mole. Danshiro quickly realized that Okiku was to blame, and this is where the plot thickens, for Danshiro had long carried an unrequited flame for the girl. Confronting her with the information, he offered to cover up her involvement if she would consent to being his lover. Okiku flat out refused. And so Danshiro hatched a plot of his own: he hid one of a set of ten priceless heirloom plates, then publicly blamed Okiku for losing it, essentially giving him carte blanche to deal with her as he wished. After killing the girl, he threw her bound body down a well.
From that point on, night after night, the voice of ghostly counting began to issue from the well, slowly reaching “nine” before breaking off and beginning again, over and over, night after night. Eventually, word of the entire sordid affair reached the ears of the lord of the castle, who ordered Tessan’s suicide by disembowelment and dissolution of his family holdings.
There’s another version of the story that takes place in Edo. In the quarter of the city that was home to higher-ranking servants of the Shogun stood a mansion owned by Lord Aoyama, the representative of the province of Harima. Aoyama had arrived in Edo with a precious family heirloom — a set of ten priceless Delftware plates from the Netherlands. When his kind but clumsy young maidservant Okiku carelessly dropped and shattered one of the treasures, the infuriated Aoyama responded by cutting off her middle finger as punishment for the lost plate and locking her in the mansion’s dungeon. Somehow, Okiku managed to work her way out of her imprisonment, and flung herself to her death in the mansion’s well to escape further abuse.
Yoshitoshi’s classic portrayal of her weeping apparition materializing over the well. 1890 woodblock print.
The Attack
No matter the tale, Okiku’s manifestations always follow the same pattern: night after night, an eerie voice issues from her well, counting slowly from one to nine again and again until dawn.
In the case of Lord Aoyama, things took on an even more sinister note when his first child was born missing a middle finger.
Surviving An Encounter
Realizing this was no normal haunting, Lord Aoyama called in the abbot of the local temple to read holy sutras over the well. But the relentless counting continued unabated. One night, perhaps out of sheer frustration, the abbot shouted “ten” at the end of yet another of Okiku’s enumerations.
“Finally!” cried the voice from the well. And disappeared...
So there you have it. This is an easy one. Should a wailing, plate-counting ghost take up residence in your well, simply:
a) Grit your teeth and listen to her count.
b) At the proper moment, shout the digit that would logically come next in sequence.
c) Congratulate yourself on a spirit well appeased.
If the above doesn’t work:
d) Consider moving.
Analysis
There appears to be no fear of bodily harm from a manifestation of this sort, but the real issue isn’t the ghost. It’s the way in which she died. Okiku is essentially a stand-in for every servant who’s been mistreated by a master, and a warning to those with power to always treat those beneath them with respect. While shouting “ten” at the end of Okiku’s count caused her to disappear, the mark she left on Aoyama’s son can be seen as a symbol of the ripple effect violence has through the generations.
An Okiku-Mushi takes wing.
Trivia
Okiku-Mushi: The Swarm of 1795
For reasons yet to be science, a species of black swallowtail butterfly known as shako-ageha hatched in massive numbers that year, with the resulting cocoons filling the walls of wells throughout the Harima area. Hanging in the darkness on filaments of web that resembled tiny ropes, the pupating insects evoked the torments poor young Okiku had suffered, and locals dubbed them Okikumushi — “Okiku bugs.” The nickname remains even today.
Hokusai’s eerie take: a snake-like creature with a body made of plates, exhaling a ghostly breath. 1830 woodblock print.
The Real Deal
The temple of Chokyu-ji in the city of Hikone of Shiga prefecture owns a set of plates said to have belonged to Okiku. The story goes that they were given to the temple by her mother, so that the priests could perform a kuyo (funeral rite) over them and release her daughter’s connection to them. Today only six of the original set remain.
Sexy & Scary: 03
OTSUYU
Sexy & Scary: 03
OTSUYU
Name in Japanese: お露
Origin: “Botan Doro” (“The Tale of the Peony Lantern”)
Gender: Female
Translation of name: “Morning dew”
Age at death: 16 or 17 (estimated)
Cause of death: Heartbreak
Distinctive features Superficially, a normal-seeming young woman carrying a peony lantern (see below). Often accompanied by servant, Oyone
Place of internment Shin-Banzuin Cemetery, Tokyo
Location of haunting Nezu, Tokyo
Form of Attack Carnal pleasures
Existence Believed to be fictional
Threat Level Medium
Claim to Fame
Next to Oiwa (p.16) and Okiku (p.20) she is one of Japan’s “big three” famous ghosts. But in contrast to Oiwa’s furious retributions, Otsuyu’s tale is one of grave affections.
The Story
The daughter of a hatamoto, a high-ranking samurai in the service of the Shogun, beautiful young Otsuyu’s fate was sealed after a chance introduction to a masterless ronin named Hagiwara Shinzaburo. It was love at first sight for both sides, but a lowly ronin could never ask for the hand of a hatamoto’s daughter in marriage — least of all from Otsuyu’s father, a notoriously stern fellow with a nasty reputation for skewering those who displeased him.
For weeks and months, Shinzaburo begged the neighborhood physician who had introduced the pair to chaperone another visit to Otsuyu; but realizing that the smoldering fire he had inadvertently sparked c
ould well erupt into a conflagration that would consume him as well, the wise but craven doctor hemmed and hawed and made excuses.
Pining for a true love she believed had abandoned her, Otsuyu began to waste away and died, followed shortly thereafter by her heartbroken maidservant Oyone.
Learning of Otsuyu’s untimely death, Shinzaburo’s misery knew no bounds. He inscribed her name on a memorial tablet and placed offerings before it daily. When Obon, the festival of the dead, rolled around that summer, he laid food and lanterns before the tablet as was the custom, and prepared for another night of lamenting love lost.
No sooner than Shinzaburo had lit the lanterns than he heard the clack-clack of wooden geta on the street outside his house. Sliding open a window, he caught sight of a pair of beautiful ladies. The younger of the two, apparently a servant, illuminated the way with a peony lantern. Shinzaburo rubbed his eyes. Could it be? There was no question about it: it was Otsuyu and her maid!
“I thought you were dead!” he cried.
“And I you,” replied Otsuyu in equal astonishment.
Shinzaburo quickly invited the pair into his home, where the trio pieced together how both sides had been deceived to keep them apart. They plotted through the night and separated at daybreak, with a promise that they would soon never part again. For seven nights — always at night — Otsuyu and her maidservant returned to cement their plans.