Oiwa

She is the most famous ghost in Japan, and you have almost certainly seen her face without knowing whose it was.

Oiwa.

What was done to her

She was married to a rōnin named Iemon, and Iemon wanted out — because a wealthier match had become available and his wife was in the way.

So she was given a poison, handed to her as a facial cream. A gift. A cosmetic. Something to make her more beautiful.

It disfigured her.

Her left eye drooped down her ruined face. And when she sat at the mirror and combed her hair, it came away in her hands — in bloody handfuls, more and more of it, while she watched what was happening to her face and understood, all at once, everything.

That's the scene the whole play is built around, and it is still, two hundred years later, one of the most difficult things in the kabuki repertoire to watch.

Then she comes back

Her face blooms out of paper lanterns.

It surfaces where Iemon looks — in a lantern, in a mosquito net, in the face of his new bride at the wedding, so that he cuts down the wrong person.

And she drives every one of her betrayers to destruction, methodically, without hurry.

The play

*Tōkaidō Yotsuya Kaidan, by Tsuruya Nanboku IV, premiered 1825* at the Nakamura-za in Edo.

It was an enormous hit, and its stagecraft became permanent.

The hair-combing — kamisuki — where stagehands feed hair up through the floor so that impossibly much of it keeps coming away in her hands.

The lantern face — chōchin-nuke — where the paper of a hanging lantern splits and her face comes through it.

The door-flip — toitagaeshi — a plank floats down the river with a corpse nailed to it, and the actor turns the board over, and there is a second corpse on the other side. One board, two murders, one prop.

Nanboku was writing for an audience that had seen everything, and he built machines.

Sadako is her granddaughter

Oiwa's drooping left eye is the single most recognizable face in Japanese horror.

Long black hair over a ruined face, one eye wrong, moving toward you.

The woman coming out of the well in Ring is a direct descendant. So is most of what the world thinks of as Japanese horror. It all runs back to a poisoned cosmetic in 1825.

And here is the part that is genuinely extraordinary

Tradition holds that Oiwa is buried at Myōgyō-ji, in Sugamo, Tokyo. There is an Oiwa Inari shrine in Yotsuya.

And before staging any adaptation of her story, it is the tradition for the principal actors and the director to visit her grave and ask her permission and her blessing.

This is not a quaint old custom. It is done now. Film productions do it. Stage productions do it. There are photographs.

And productions that skipped it have accumulated a body of accident lore — injuries, fires, deaths on set — which circulates in the industry and which people take seriously enough that skipping it is simply not done.

So there is a fictional character, invented for the stage in 1825, who is currently the subject of a documented permission-seeking protocol in the twenty-first-century entertainment industry.

Nobody is required to believe in her. Everybody goes anyway.

There's a complication, and it's a good one

There appears to have been a real Tamiya Oiwa in the seventeenth century.

And by the tradition attached to the Tamiya shrine in Shinjuku, she was — this is the awkward part — a faithful wife in a harmonious marriage, whose shrine predates the play entirely.

So there are now two sites, splitting her memory in half.

One remembers a woman who was destroyed by her husband and came back for him.

The other remembers a woman whose marriage was fine.

Nanboku took a name attached to a shrine about a good wife and wrote the most famous story of marital betrayal in Japanese history around it. And now both memories are maintained, at different addresses, a few kilometres apart.

She's one of three

Japan's great vengeful women come as a set.

Oiwa — poison and betrayal.

Kasane — a murder that keeps coming back through the generations of the man who did it.

Okiku — a servant accused of losing a plate, coerced, killed, and counting at the bottom of a well forever.

Three wronged women. Three real, visitable sites — a grave, a river pool, a well. Three performance traditions still running.

Which is the useful way to think about the whole genre. The Japanese ghost story is the country's longest-running justice claim: cases that were never heard, still being filed, nightly, in theatres, for two hundred years.