She also appears in Izumi Kyōka’s play Tenshu Monogatari. In fact, there’s a small shrine in there dedicated to her. OsakabehimeĪs an adult, I discovered the existence of another wild lady in Himeji Castle: Osakabehime, a yokai who resides in the castle keep. Of all the ghosts living inside me, she’s always number one.Ĭover of an out-of-print bilingual edition of Tenshu Monogatari 2. Okiku planted inside me the awareness that horror is all around us in our every day lives-that it isn’t only scary, but also can generate feelings of familiarity and even strength. While there, I caught sight of a young boy visiting with his mother, looking into the well and imitating Okiku’s voice counting the plates: “One, two, three…” It strikes me as truly great that even into the 21st century, Okiku’s legacy lives on in that region. Recently restored, Himeji Castle seemed to me unnaturally white, but the Okiku Well looked to me just as it always had done. While writing WTWLA a few years ago, I visited Himeji Castle for the first time in over a decade, and saw the Okiku Well again. It also made me feel very proud of Okiku.
#FEMALE ONI X HUMAN TV#
Watching the TV adaptation of Okiku’s story as a child, and seeing the Okiku Well which really existed in the city where I lived being presented on TV as something fictional gave me the strangest sensation, like reality and fantasy had collided. In Japan, the season for telling ghost stories is summer, so that’s when TV adaptations of ghost stories are shown. Living in a mansion echoing with the sounds of Okiku’s counting and the smashing of plates, those who destroyed her are drawn ineluctably to a bad end themselves, as if being swallowed up by the grotesquery they created.Īs superpowers go, counting plates may seem relatively tame, but there’s something about this simplicity that conveys the depths of Okiku’s resentment. As superpowers go, becoming a ghost and counting plates may seem relatively tame, but there’s something about this simplicity that conveys the depths of Okiku’s resentment. For those who conspired to her take down, this spectacle must serve as a harrowing reminder of their deeds. As a ghost, she emerges from the well each night, looking terrifying, and forever counting the plates: “One, two…” Getting to 9, she then exclaims, “Ah, there really is one missing!” But knowing her own innocence, she begins to counts again.
On school field-trips or when relatives came to visit, I would go up to the castle, and there, inside its grounds, stood the Okiku Well.Īfter becoming dragged into plotting of the men around her, Okiku is falsely accused of the loss of one of the house’s treasured set of ten plates, and eventually killed and thrown into a well. Like the character of Kikue in Where the Wild Ladies Are, I grew up in the city of Himeji, where Himeji Castle is located. Okiku (painting by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi) 1. Also, admitting this may get me in trouble with the experts, but I don’t make any strict distinctions between ghosts, monsters, yokai and so on-I tend to think of them all as kinds of wild ladies. The versions of the tales I’m relating here are the ones that I read and heard when I was growing up.
It also made me think afresh about Japanese women, myself included, who, so long as they don’t die or assume an entirely different form, remain unable to reveal their true natures.įolktales and tales of yore have lots of geographical variations, and can undergo further changes when they’re set down in certain versions by particular artists.
Maybe I had a wild lady inside myself, maybe I myself was a wild lady as well-these thoughts brought with them all the joy of a revelation. As well as a sense of surprise at how unusual they seemed, they generated in me a feeling of familiarity-as if what they were portraying was a part of myself as well. Female spirits deviated wildly from the way that women are demanded to be by Japanese social norms, and it was that discrepancy that attracted me.
#FEMALE ONI X HUMAN FULL#
I suppose that being a woman myself had something to do with it, but there was more to it than that: the female ghosts and spirits seemed to me simply more interesting, more full of character. I asked myself why it was that I liked female spirits more than the male ones. Into adulthood, it occurred to me that what draws me to these female spirits is the way that they expose the true nature of people leading a regular lives in society, which they’ve grown accustomed to hiding without a second thought.
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