Otsuyu

Otsuyu is the protagonist of Botan Dōrō, «the peony lantern», one of the three great ghost stories (kaidan) of Japan, together with the Yotsuya Kaidan of Oiwa and the Sarayashiki of Okiku. The tale arrived from China, from a story of the collection Jian Deng Xin Hua, and Asai Ryōi acclimated it to Japan in his Otogi Bōko (1666); centuries later, the rakugo master San'yūtei Enchō fixed it in his most celebrated version (1884). Otsuyu was the daughter of a samurai who fell in love with the young Ogiwara Shinzaburō in an impossible love. Separated from him and consumed by grief, she fell ill and died, and Shinzaburō was hidden her death. The first night of Obon, the festival of the dead, he heard in the street the «karan, koron» of some wooden sandals and saw Otsuyu approaching, beautiful as always, accompanied by her maid Oyone, who carried a lantern adorned with peonies. Ignorant that she was dead, he received her, and since then she returned every night.

Night after night Otsuyu would come with her peony lantern and stay with Shinzaburō until dawn, and he, happy, grew thinner and paler without understanding why. It was a neighbor, suspicious of the nocturnal noises, who spied through a crack and discovered the horror: by the light of the lantern, Shinzaburō was not embracing a beautiful woman, but a skeleton with fleshless fingers, while the lantern hung from the hand of another corpse, that of the maid Oyone. Otsuyu's beauty was an illusion that only held in the penumbra of the lantern; under it there was nothing but bone and rot. Terrified, the neighbor ran to warn a priest, who confirmed what no one dared to say: the young man was letting himself be loved by a dead woman, and each visit brought him a little closer to the grave. Otsuyu does not return to take revenge, like Oiwa or Okiku, but for love, but that love is equally mortal: she intends to take Shinzaburō with her to the other side.

To save Shinzaburō, the priest sealed his house with ofuda, strips of sacred paper with spells, and gave him a sutra so that he would recite it without rest. That night Otsuyu and Oyone arrived as always, but they could not cross the protected threshold; they could be heard moaning and calling him from outside, unable to enter. The seal would have sufficed, were it not for human greed: the servants of the house, bribed by the spirits (or tempted by a gold that in the light of day turned out to be bones and leaves), removed one of the amulets. That same night Otsuyu entered at last. The next morning they found Shinzaburō dead, with his face frozen in terror and his arms clasped around the bones of Otsuyu, united at last in death. The Botan Dōrō became the great tale of love and horror of Japanese theater and literature, and its central image, the lady of the lantern whose beauty hides a skeleton, one of the emblems of the kaidan.