Okiku

Okiku's legend is not one legend but two, and telling them as if they were the same is the commonest mistake made about her. Both are called Sarayashiki, «the plate mansion», and both end with a woman in a well counting crockery; in almost everything else they differ.

The Banshū version (Banshū being the old name of Harima province, where Himeji stands) sets it in that castle, and there Okiku is no ordinary maid: she is a spy. The loyal retainer Kinugasa Motonobu discovers that Aoyama Tetsuzan is plotting to seize the domain and places her inside the plotter's household to watch him. When the scheme goes wrong, one of Aoyama's men falsely accuses her of losing one of the ten plates the house keeps as an inherited treasure, tortures her to death and throws the body down an old well. This is the version that reached the stage first: a puppet jōruri premiered in 1741 at the Toyotake theatre in Osaka, set in the Muromachi period.

The Banchō version moves the house to a district of Edo and swaps the villain for Aoyama Harima. It is the one that gave its name to the better-known play, and that play is far later than almost everyone assumes.

What this entry narrates, and what the well still shown to visitors supports, is the Himeji version.

What is heard beside the well is a count. A woman's voice says one, two, three, and goes on to nine; then it breaks into a wail and begins again. It never reaches ten, because the tenth plate is the one that is missing and the one that killed her.

The detail matters more than it seems, because it defines what kind of ghost she is. Okiku's curse is not an attack: it is a repetition. She pursues no one, disfigures no one, drags her murderer into no madness as Oiwa does in the Yotsuya Kaidan. She merely counts, and whoever hears her sickens, goes mad or dies from the sheer fact of having listened. She is one of the very few Japanese spectres whose entire power consists of a sound.

And precisely for that reason tradition grants her a way out that almost no other onryō has. In several versions someone (a neighbour with nerve, a monk) waits at the well's rim for the voice to reach nine and shouts «ten!» into the silence that follows. The count is completed, the grievance closed, and Okiku appears no more. It is a release by arithmetic: she need not be exorcised or defeated, her sentence needs finishing.

The well exists. It is called Okiku-ido, it stands inside the grounds of Himeji Castle and is shown to visitors; beside it is a small shrine dedicated to her. A ghost with a postal address is not unique to her (Oiwa has one too, in Tokyo) but it is uncommon enough to explain how far this legend has travelled: there is a place to go to.

Himeji also credits her with an insect. A certain chrysalis found in the area has a shape recalling a woman with her arms bound, and local tradition calls it okiku-mushi, «Okiku's bug», explaining that it is her, returning each year in that form. It is a clean case of legend adhering to a real observation of nature: the name does not explain the insect, the insect sustains the name.

And the most disconcerting part remains, the part almost nobody knows. The play that made Okiku universal is neither old nor a ghost story. Banchō Sarayashiki, by Okamoto Kidō, premiered at the Hongō-za theatre in Tokyo in February 1916. In it Okiku is no innocent falsely accused: she breaks the plate on purpose, to find out whether Aoyama Harima truly loves her or merely tolerates her, and he kills her on feeling himself put to the test. There is no spectre, no counting at the well, no revenge. The version most performed over the last century is, at bottom, the denial of the legend that preceded it.