Oiwa

Also Known As: お岩; also Oiwa-san, Tamiya Oiwa; the ghost of Tōkaidō Yotsuya Kaidan
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Undead/Cursed Beings
Mythical Attributes: Oiwa is a wronged wife whose dying curse gives her the power to appear anywhere her betrayer looks, in any object, until his household and his allies are dead.
Role in Mythos: She is the definitive onryō of Japanese tradition, the vengeful female ghost against whom every later one is measured.
Relation to Humans: The living cannot bargain with her and cannot outrun her, because her vengeance is a matter of debt rather than malice and it is settled only when the last person who profited from her death has paid. Outside the story she is treated as a real presence, and companies staging or filming her tale still send their casts to her shrine first.

A woman kneels at a low mirror in a rented house in Edo, blackening her teeth. The pot of tooth-black is at her knee, the baby is asleep behind her, and the summer air in the room does not move. She takes up her comb, draws it through her hair once, and it comes away heavy. She draws it again. On the floor around her the hair keeps arriving, long dark ropes of it, and she goes on combing because the alternative is to stop and look at what is in the glass.

That is the scene, called kamisuki, that made Tōkaidō Yotsuya Kaidan the most successful ghost play in the history of the Japanese stage, and it is still the reason people go. Tsuruya Nanboku IV wrote it in 1825 for the Nakamura-za, and he built it to be performed in alternation with Kanadehon Chūshingura, the great national story of forty-seven loyal retainers avenging their lord. Audiences watched the two over two days, the celebrated version of samurai honour and then the version in which the same class of men murder their fathers-in-law, poison their wives and sell their kimonos. Nanboku made the connection explicit. Oiwa’s father Yotsuya Samon and her husband Tamiya Iemon are both rōnin of the Enya house, the same house whose retainers carry out the famous vendetta. The loyal retainers and the man who kills Oiwa come out of the same collapse.

Iemon wants back into service and Oiwa is in his way. She has just given birth, the household has no money, and next door the physician Itō Kihei has a granddaughter, Oume, who wants Iemon and a family with the connections to advance him. Kihei sends over a gift for the new mother, a preparation for the skin. Oiwa takes it gratefully. What it does to her is the engine of the whole play: her face swells and slackens on the left side, the eyelid sagging until the eye is a slot, the hairline receding under the comb. She is not told. She works it out from her husband’s face and from the mirror, in that order.

She dies badly, and the manner of it matters, because it is not quite murder. In the standard staging she takes up a sword in her fury and falls on it at the throat, cursing Iemon and the Itō house with her last breath. Iemon has by then also killed the servant Kobotoke Kohei, and he has both bodies nailed to opposite faces of a wooden door and pushed into the canal.

The door comes back. Iemon is fishing at the Onbōbori, the ditch on the edge of the city, when it drifts up out of the dark water with Oiwa’s face on it, and when he turns it over Kohei is on the other side. The trick is called toitagaeshi and one actor plays both corpses, changing sides through a hole cut in the board in the seconds the door takes to flip. The rest of the haunting is built from the same theatrical carpentry: she rises out of a burning paper lantern, she reaches out of the family altar, she is in the bedding, she is in the face of the bride. Iemon lifts the veil at his own wedding and cuts down what he sees, and it is Oume. He kills Kihei the same way a moment later, believing he is killing Kohei. Everyone connected with him dies, one after another, and at the end Satō Yomoshichi, who is married to Oiwa’s sister Osode, finishes him.

Oiwa was invented twice. The first version is older and much less sympathetic: a clandestine manuscript of 1727 called the Yotsuya zōtan, circulating in Edo as neighbourhood scandal, in which Oiwa is ugly, jealous and cruel, and a reader can end up feeling rather sorry for Iemon. Nanboku took that hundred-year-old rumour and reversed its moral polarity. He made her ordinary and decent and gave the poison the job of destroying her, so that the disfigurement is done to her rather than born with her, and the audience has somewhere to put its anger. Underneath both lies a real family. The Tamiya kept a shrine in Yotsuya Samon-chō to a wife of the house said to have died in the 1630s, an Inari shrine that carried her name long before any of this reached a stage. What she was actually like is not recoverable. The record for the historical Oiwa is a shrine, a family name and a date, and everything vivid about her arrived later.

The play is not history, and it has never behaved like fiction either. It became custom for actors taking her role to go to the Oiwa Inari Tamiya shrine before opening, and the custom hardened into a rule with teeth: casts who skipped the visit were said to fall ill, to be injured, to have accidents on set. Film crews still go, and the story has been filmed more than thirty times. Hokusai put her face into a torn paper lantern around 1831, the paper ribs of it forming her brow and cheek, printed in the new Prussian blue that Edo associated with the dead. It is one of the most reproduced images in Japanese art, and it is a portrait of a stage effect.

Her power is total within its own terms and comes entirely from the wrong done to her. She has no weapon and no army. She has the ability to be in whatever her killer is looking at, to be the lantern and the altar and the bride’s face, and to keep on being there until his mind gives way and takes his hand with it. She does not need to touch anyone. Iemon does almost all of the killing himself.

The limits are equally strict. Her reach ends exactly at the edge of her grievance, and it never widens to include the innocent; she is remembered as the frightening one and not the indiscriminate one. She cannot be reasoned with, apologised to, or bought off with rites, and the play offers no exorcist and no priest who can help. When the debt is paid the haunting stops, and what she leaves behind is nothing more supernatural than a shrine, an offering box and a queue of actors waiting to be excused.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Oiwa?

Oiwa is the vengeful ghost at the centre of Tōkaidō Yotsuya Kaidan, the kabuki play written by Tsuruya Nanboku IV in 1825 and the most famous ghost story in Japan. In the play she is the wife of the rōnin Tamiya Iemon, who is poisoned and disfigured by a neighbour so that Iemon can remarry into a wealthier family. She dies cursing him and returns to destroy everyone involved.

How was Oiwa disfigured?

The physician Itō Kihei sent Oiwa a gift of skin preparation that was in fact poison, given so that Iemon would abandon her and marry Kihei’s granddaughter Oume. It swelled and slackened the left side of her face until the eyelid drooped over the eye, and her hair began falling out in handfuls when she combed it. The scene in which she combs it, known as kamisuki, is the best-known moment in the play.

Is Oiwa an onryō?

Yes. Oiwa is the defining example of the onryō, the vengeful spirit of Japanese belief that returns to settle a specific injustice rather than to haunt at random. Her vengeance falls only on Iemon and the people who conspired with him, and it ends when they are dead.

Was Oiwa a real person?

There was a real Tamiya Oiwa, a wife of the Tamiya household in the Yotsuya district of Edo, associated with an Inari shrine that bore her name and traditionally said to have died in the 1630s. Almost nothing is known about her life. The poisoning, the disfigurement and the vengeance come from a 1727 manuscript called the Yotsuya zōtan and from Nanboku’s play a century after that, not from any record of the woman herself.

Why do actors visit Oiwa’s shrine before performing?

It became customary for casts staging Yotsuya Kaidan to pay their respects at the Oiwa Inari Tamiya shrine in Tokyo before opening, and the belief grew that those who did not would suffer illness, injury or accidents during the production. Film and television crews adapting the story still make the visit. The tale has been filmed more than thirty times, and the custom has followed it from the stage to the screen.