Yurei Attack! - Hiroko Yoda Yokai ATTACK! Series

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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.

      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.

      ______________________

      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

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