In such a play, a travelling silk-dealer neglects his wife and wanders far afield, experiencing many adventures. At last his steps turn homeward. His wife appears, but he does not know that she is a visitant from another world, although the audience is in the secret, the delicate suggestions of ghosthood preparing them for the supernatural. She tells him her sad story, he falls asleep, and she disappears in a truly ghost-like fashion, sinking down slowly behind the stone which marks her burial-place. The stage is darkened and with the light there is seen the reality—the dwelling in ruins and decay, tall weeds growing through the broken floor, and a pale moon throwing its white light over the deserted scene.
In a play by Mokuami, Sogoro, a fish-dealer, of a low type but chivalrous, comes to right the wrong done to his sister O-Tsuta, a maid in the residence of a daimyo. She has been tortured and put to death at the instigation of a man-servant in the lord’s service whose overtures she had spurned. Sogoro appears brandishing a sake tub, from which he has imbibed too freely. He is finally calmed by a gift of money for the girl’s funeral expenses, and the news that the plotter against his innocent sister has gone the way of all stage villains.
O-Tsuta, who has been sent to her untimely end under such wrongful circumstance, returns as an apparition. Her body has been thrown into the garden well and issues forth in a puff of smoke, a haggard, grey, emaciated spirit with uncanny movements appearing as a shadow on the shoji, or white paper window.
Kasane is another ghostly heroine popular with Kabuki audiences. She is disfigured and deformed, and has been transformed from a pretty woman into one unpleasant to behold. Kasane has married Kinugawa, her dead sister’s husband, and, all unknowing, she is the victim of ghostly jealousy.
Her husband keeps her blissfully unaware of her facial defects, as he has forbidden her to look in a mirror. She does so, is overcome by horror, fights with Kinugawa and is killed. Her ghost rises out of the river, long, wan, grey, tapering, like a shadow that moves upward through no power of its own, to disappear in a similar strange fashion behind a bridge.
Once more the wraith appears calling Kinugawa to come, and he is just about to sink under the enchantment of the ghostly Kasane, when he thinks of a spell to break the chains of death that seem binding him and is released just as morning dawns. A black drop curtain falls revealing a sunny morning, people passing over the bridge, among them a charming young maiden, the very actor who impersonated the unfortunate Kasane but a moment before.
Of all the ghostly heroines of Kabuki, O-Iwa is certainly the most tragic. She is the creation of Namboku Tsuruya in his play Yotsuya Kaidan, The Ghost of Yotsuya, the latter a thriving quarter of modern Tokyo.
