three japanese ghosts
On Yūrei
The Japanese word for ghost, it has to be said, is bettter than the English.
All the way back to Old English, ghost means… just ghost. Ghost, spirit, spectre — the dead returned, incorporeal. You can push it back to the Proto-Indo-European word *ǵʰéysd-os, linked to the terms for “anger” or “agitation,” but there the linguistic trail runs dry.1
The Japanese word is yūrei. No one knows where that originally comes from, because Japanese is a language isolate, not related to any other language spoken in Asia; its antecedents have long since vanished. Yūrei is a compound term: 幽霊, meaning something like “dim soul.” That is in fairness a much cooler term than “ghost.”
There are different types of yūrei: the onryō, or vengeful ghosts; funayūrei, who died at sea; ubume, women who died in childbirth or while pregnant; and more besides. This post, though, is about the San O-Yūrei (“Three Great Ghosts”) of Japan, the most famous ghost stories in the country.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5801584d-4a7b-4d77-9c9d-f85286adc5b1_640x938.jpeg)
Okiku
Okiku stands out from the other two spirits on this list because the motivation behind her return to the world of the living isn’t a powerful emotion like love or hate but instead a very specific piece of unfinished business: the need to find a missing plate. Unlike the others, too, she seems to be a true creature of folklore, with references to her story appearing well before a mid-18th century bunraku play, Banchō Sarayashiki, helped catapult her to supernatural stardom.2
With no one source to define her, Okiku’s tale is preserved in many variations (at least 48, by one scholar’s reckoning). In broad strokes, it’s a story of a servant girl — Okiku, meaning “Chrysanthemum” — at the manor of a great lord or samurai.3 For varying reasons, she is (sometimes falsely) accused of breaking or losing one of ten valuable heirloom plates belonging to the manorial family, and either kills herself (by jumping down the well) or is tortured and murdered (and thrown down the well) as a result. Each night during the hour of the Ox —1 to 3 AM, when the dead and the monstrous are at their most active — she climbs her way to the surface and counts the remaining plates, letting out a mounful wail when she fails to find the missing tenth.
![hokusai ghost hokusai ghost](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbff3467c-f2e2-4d2d-b9e2-0f504f7d36da_570x801.jpeg)
It’s not clear where the story of Okiku originated, or whether it was associated with one particular place before spreading throughout the country. A number of locales in Japan are said to be her haunting grounds — any old manor with a well fits the bill, after all. But her ghost is most famously linked to the one at the foot of the grand Himeji Castle in Hyōgo Prefecture. There’s even a shrine to her in the city itself, although it has middling reviews on TripAdvisor.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F58109db1-c144-4b13-8be8-ca502178f998_640x480.jpeg)
None of this is to be confused with the other Okiku: a haunted doll whose hair was said to start growing after the death of her young owner. That Okiku is housed in a small shrine in Mennenji Temple, where a priest is tasked with cutting her still-growing hair. Besides the name, she has no relation to the Okiku of the well.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1d6cc773-e6bc-4320-beff-5e607c4834a3_694x394.png)
You can watch a subtitled and very atmospheic reading of Okiku’s story here.
Oiwa
Despite being the youngest yūrei in this list, Oiwa is perhaps the most famous. She made her debut in an 1825 kabuki play, the Yotsuya Kaidan (“Ghost/Strange Story of Yotsuya”) by Tsuruya Nanboku IV. The play is a complex revenge tale, soaked with blood and lust. In it the young and beautiful Oiwa, married to a rōnin named Iemon, is horribly disfigured by a poison sent by a jealous lover who desires Iemon for herself. Iemon is repulsed by her mutilated appearance and conspires to have her dishonored so that he can justly divorce her. Betrayed and in despair, she first takes her own life. But as an onryō, a vengeful spirit, Oiwa returns and deceives Iemon into murdering his new bride, then hounds him into insanity and death.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc7558b06-639a-40ee-987d-ed63db891992_640x912.jpeg)
Plays or films based featuring Oiwa are allegedly liable to be cursed, much like the doom said to hang over productions of Macbeth in the west. Bad luck and accidents are said to haunt those who try to depict the tale of the onryō — a major plot point in the phenomenal and little-known Senritsu Kaiki File series of found footage horror. Like Okiku, Oiwa also has a shrine dedicated to her.
![Oiwa Shrine's main building and red banners Oiwa Shrine's main building and red banners](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F31df5f40-2eaa-4264-bdc2-b758f2d34ded_640x360.jpeg)
You can watch part of the Yotsuya Kaidan here.
Otsuyu
Otsuyu is not a malevolent ghost. Otsuyu is a horny and tragic ghost.
Her story is first found in the 1666 stirt “Botan Dōrō” (“The Peony Lantern”) by Ryōi Asai. Asai was loosely adapting a fourteenth century Chinese work — part of a collection of, in Davisson’s words, “erotically tinged tales disguised as Buddhist moral lessons.” In adapting the story, Asai dropped its didactic elements in order to emphasize its tragic and erotic side.
Otsuyu (“Dew”) was a young woman in a loveless marriage to an older man. Isolated except for a maidservant, she met and fell in love with a young warrior named Ogiwara. Though he promised to visit her, social restrictions and chance conspired to keep them separated. Believing herself forsaken by her lover, Otsuyu pined away and died. The young samurai, shattered by grief and guilt, shut himself up in his home.
One night during the Festival of the Dead, Ogiwara heard the clop of a woman’s sandals on the road outside, and looked to see Otsuyu striding by. He called out to her, and learned — incredibly — that there had been a misunderstanding! She was alive, but had been told that he had died; he, also alive, had heard the reverse. They spent the night together, and she left in the morning. This was not an end, but a beginning: the samurai and the young woman met night after night, making love under the moon, parting before the dawn.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc49a81cf-cb46-4057-a641-eb080de155b5_640x990.jpeg)
One night, though, a servant crept to Ogiwara’s house to spy on the lovers. Peering through a shutter, he saw the samurai with his lady, but:
[her face] was the face of a woman long dead, — and the fingers caressing were fingers of naked bone, — and of the body below the waist there was not anything : it melted off into thinnest trailing shadow. Where the eyes of the lover deluded saw youth and grace and beauty, there appeared to the watcher horror only, and the emptiness of death.4
Otsuyu does not seem to mean her lover any harm. Nevertheless, to lay with the dead is to court death, and Ogiwara will surely die if he continues to bed his ghostly mistress.
With the help of a priest, Ogiwara covers his house with ofuda (translated, at least in the Pokémon games, as “Spell Tag”) which ward off the spirits of the dead. But night after night, between 1 and 3 AM, Otsuyu calls to her lover from beyond the warded walls of his home. He resisted, but was betrayed: in exchange for a promise of wealth from the ghosts, Ogiwara’s servant strips the ofuda from his master’s home. In the morning the samurai is found
hideously dead; — and his face was the face of a man who had died in the uttermost agony of fear ; — and lying beside him in the bed were the bones of a woman! And the bones of the arms, and the bones of the hands, clung fast around his neck.5
![File:神札 - Ofuda.jpg File:神札 - Ofuda.jpg](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F136cd93c-7cfc-4d98-a639-4d427e601ede_754x600.jpeg)
Otsuyu, as near as I can tell, has no shrine. Alone among her San O-Yūrei sisters, no one seems to believe in or revere her. Her sorrowful tale ended, postmortem, when her lover joined her on the other side.
Further Reading
This post drew from both Zack Davisson’s Yūrei: The Japanese Ghost (2015, 2020) and Michael Dylan Foster’s The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore (2015). It can be difficult to find books that serve as good general overviews of Japanese supernatural material in English, but I recommend these two.
For the story of Otsuyu, I relied upon the translation of “Botan Dōrō” in Lafcadio Hearn’s In Ghostly Japan (1899, 2011). Hearn’s collection, as well as his Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, are classics, and the latter was made into an acclaimed and visually stunning film in 1964.6 Still, for primary sources, the best choice might be Higashi Masao’s Kaiki: Uncanny Tales From Japan (2020), a three-volume set that collects hundreds of stories from 1776 to the contemporary period.
For yūrei art, I like Japanese Yokai and Other Supernatural Beings (2023) from Tuttle. Matthew Meyer has also produced four gorgeously illustrated books on yokai, or Japanese monsters, including but not limited to the various subtypes of yūrei. He’s also on Twitter as @MatthewMeyerArt.
Maybe it’s linked to the modern English word for “guest,” but my philology isn’t strong enough to make an assertion on that front.
Banchō Sarayashiki translates to “The Plate Mansion at Banchō.” A sarayashiki is any mansion said to be haunted by Okiku. Bunraku is a form of puppet theater.
The more modern form of the name “Okiku” is just “Kiku,” which, yes, is a character in One Piece.
From Lafcadio Hearn’s translation, pp. 87-88.
Hearn, pp. 106-7.
Criterion says 1965 but I’m fairly sure that’s incorrect, unless they mean that the English sub dates from that year.