Okiku

Also Known As: お菊; the heroine of the Sarayashiki tales, called Hanano in the oldest surviving version
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Undead/Cursed Beings
Mythical Attributes: Okiku returns nightly to the well she was killed in and counts the ten heirloom plates she was blamed for losing, reaching nine and breaking off into a wail.
Role in Mythos: She is Japan’s definitive ghost of injustice, the servant destroyed by a powerful man over a fault that was never hers, and one of the country’s most retold kaidan.
Relation to Humans: She does not hunt the living and takes no interest in strangers, but her voice is inescapable inside the house that wronged her, and in some tellings the household is driven out or driven mad by it. She can be released rather than defeated, by someone willing to stand at the well and finish her count.

Somewhere past midnight the counting starts, and it always starts the same way. One plate. Two plates. Three. The voice comes up out of the well unhurried and cold, the way people count when they already know the answer and are hoping to be wrong, and it climbs to nine and stops. What follows is not quite a scream. It is the sound a person makes when the ninth plate is the last one and there is nowhere left to look.

The story is called Sarayashiki, the Plate Mansion, and it survives in two famous forms: the Banshū Sarayashiki of Himeji in old Harima province, and the Banchō Sarayashiki set in the samurai quarter of Edo. Both have been rewritten for puppet theatre, kabuki, rakugo, novels and film for close to three hundred years. Most tellings share the same bones: a set of ten heirloom plates, a woman named Okiku, one plate that goes missing, a powerful man she has crossed, and a well. The oldest surviving text, described below, has no plates and no well at all.

In the Himeji telling the setting is the warring-states period, when the Kodera family held the district. Aoyama Tetsuzan, one of their senior retainers, wanted the castle for himself, and the Kodera knew it, which is why a woman called Okiku was placed in his household as a servant and left there to listen. When the head of the family died in 1504 and the young Norimoto succeeded him, Tetsuzan saw his moment and arranged to poison the whole Kodera line at a spring flower-viewing at Zuiganji temple. His own son Kogorō tried to stop him and was thrown into a cell for it. Okiku got the plot out of Kogorō and carried it to Norimoto in time. The poisoning failed. The war that followed did not, and Tetsuzan took Himeji anyway while Norimoto fled to the island of Ieshima.

Then came the rainy season, and a victory banquet, and the plates. Tetsuzan had the local strongmen in to eat, and ordered out the komogae no gusokuzara, the Kodera family’s set of ten, to serve soba on. Okiku was told to prepare them. One of Tetsuzan’s men, Chōnotsubo Danshirō, had been making advances to her for a long time and getting nowhere, and he saw exactly what a set of ten was worth. He took one plate and hid it, and waited. When the count came up short, Tetsuzan turned on her, and Danshirō stepped in with an offer to take custody of the girl himself, which was granted. In his own garden he strung her up from a pine tree, beat her, and when she still refused him, threw her into the well.

She had done nothing. Everyone in the story knows it, including the man who killed her.

From that night the voice came up out of the well counting to nine, and the sound of plates rattling ran through the rooms of the house, and people began calling the place the Plate Mansion. Norimoto eventually retook Himeji with help from an allied lord. Tetsuzan died fighting. Kogorō, shamed by his father, killed himself. Danshirō came out with the hidden plate in his hands and asked to surrender, and Norimoto refused him and handed him instead to Okiku’s two sisters, who were waiting at Murotsu. A shrine to her was raised in the precinct of the Jūnisho Shrine in Himeji, and the pine she had hung from was said to wither every year when the rains came and go green again when they passed.

Nobody ever described her. Not her face, not her clothes, not what she looked like coming out of the water. She is one of the few great ghosts in Japanese tradition defined entirely by a sound and a number, and the tellers seem to have understood that the counting was more frightening than any face would be. The picture that fills the gap is Hokusai’s, made in 1831 or 1832 for an unfinished series called One Hundred Ghost Tales: a woman’s head lifting out of a broken well curb on a long serpentine neck made of stacked blue and white dishes, her hair trailing down. The blue is Prussian blue, newly cheap in Edo at the time, and to the audience it read as the colour of death rather than as anything cheerful.

The oldest version of the tale is stranger than the famous one and worth knowing. It appears in the Chikusō Yawa, whose colophon claims it was written in 1577 by one Nagara Chikusō, and which is the main reason scholars now tend to think the Himeji story is older than the Edo one. In it the period is the late Muromachi and the local power is the Yamana clan. The master is called Odagaki Shume-no-suke, the heroine is named Hanano rather than Okiku, and the treasure is not ten plates at all but a set of five abalone-shell cups. A young samurai named Kasadera Shin’emon hides one because she will not have him, tortures her, and kills her. Her rancour keeps returning at night. The tree she was hung from is called the Hanging Pine. There is no well, no plate counting, and no Okiku. When and how the name and the ten plates arrived, nobody can say.

What can be traced is the way the legend ate the real landscape around it. There is an old well two levels below the keep at Himeji Castle, in the upper Yamazato enclosure, that visitors are shown as Okiku’s Well. Edo-period documents call it the Tsurube-tori well, and it appears to have picked up the name Okiku’s Well only in the early Taishō era, around the time the castle opened to the public, although the legend had placed her at Himeji since at least the eighteenth century. The rainy-season pine existed too, out beyond the Kuruma gate between the middle moat and the Senba river, but the Harima Kagami of 1762 records it as a curiosity planted by a domain retainer in the 1610s or 1620s and attaches no dead servant to it. The place names in the legend, the Kuruma gate and the Kiri-no-baba riding ground, only came into being after Ikeda Terumasa built the present castle and town, generations after the warring-states period the story claims for itself. A famous tree and a famous well were quietly annexed by a good piece of Edo fiction.

The version most people carry in their heads is more recent still. A puppet play called Banshū Sarayashiki was running in Osaka from 1741, and already had Okiku enshrined at the Jūnisho Shrine. The Edo Banchō Sarayashiki moved her into the shogunal capital. Then in February 1916, at the Hongōza in Tokyo, Okamoto Kidō premiered a new kabuki Banchō Sarayashiki in which Okiku and the hatamoto Aoyama Harima are lovers, and Okiku breaks the plate herself, on purpose, to find out whether he really intends to marry her. He kills her because she doubted him. Ichikawa Sadanji II played Harima. Three centuries of a servant murdered by a predator were rewritten, in one season, into a tragedy of wounded pride between equals.

Her powers are small and unbearable. She can come back, she can be heard, and she cannot get past nine. That last limit is also the way out of the story: in a number of tellings someone waits by the well for the count, and when she falters at nine a voice from the darkness says ten, and the set is complete, and she never comes again. The exorcism is arithmetic. Her spirit is also said to have taken another shape entirely, the Okiku-mushi, a swallowtail chrysalis that hangs bound and folded like a tied woman, and which was once sold at summer festival stalls in Himeji as a curiosity.

She did not stay in Harima. One survey counted forty-eight plate-mansion sites across Japan, from Iwate down to Kagoshima, spread by lords transferring between domains, by preachers and traders, and by the theatre. There is an Okiku grave at Kuchinagatani in Sayō with the well she threw herself down on the mountain above it, and another well at the Jinshōin in Amagasaki, where the villain is conveniently a corrupt chief retainer of the Aoyama family. At the Jūnisho Shrine in Himeji her small shrine still stands, and people in the restaurant trade come to write their wishes on a plate and leave it for her, which is either an apology or a very old joke about crockery.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Okiku?

Okiku is a servant woman in Japanese folklore who was falsely blamed for losing one of her master’s ten precious heirloom plates and was murdered and thrown down a well. Her ghost returns each night to count the plates, reaching nine and then wailing. Her story, known as Sarayashiki or the Plate Mansion, is one of the most retold ghost tales in Japan.

Why does Okiku count to nine?

Okiku counts to nine because that is how many plates were left after one of the set of ten was hidden by the man she had rejected. The missing tenth is the accusation that killed her, so her ghost repeats the count she could never complete in life. The wail that follows the ninth plate is the recognisable signature of the legend.

Is Okiku’s Well at Himeji Castle real?

There is a real well at Himeji Castle, two levels below the keep in the upper Yamazato enclosure, that is shown to visitors as Okiku’s Well. It is a genuine old well, but Edo-period documents call it the Tsurube-tori well, and it seems to have acquired the name Okiku’s Well only in the early twentieth century when the castle opened to the public. The legend attached itself to an existing landmark rather than the other way around.

How is Okiku’s ghost stopped?

In several versions of the tale someone waits beside the well and calls out “ten” at the moment Okiku falters after nine. With the count completed, her spirit is satisfied and stops returning. Other tellings have no release at all, and the haunting simply drives the household of the man who killed her into madness or ruin.

What is the difference between Banshū Sarayashiki and Banchō Sarayashiki?

Banshū Sarayashiki is the Himeji version, set in warring-states Harima among the Kodera clan and their treacherous retainer Aoyama Tetsuzan, and it is generally considered the older of the two. Banchō Sarayashiki relocates the story to the samurai quarter of Edo. The best-known modern form is Okamoto Kidō’s 1916 kabuki play of that name, in which Okiku breaks the plate deliberately to test her lover.