Lot Essay
Ghosts (yurei) and Goblins (bakemono) are the two main categories of Japanese supernatural beings, the first having no feet and sometimes no legs, while the second have legs equipped with claws instead of fingers. But the ghosts are the more frightening, especially those of women, which predominate as a result of their ill-treatment by men. For example, Oiwa cruelly treated by her husband, who beat her to death, but whose ghost haunted him day and night, until in a mad fury he killed all he met including his second wife. Others are Okiku, imprisoned by her employer after breaking a plate, when she escaped and threw herself down a well from which her ghost issues with the plates she is counting, Kazane murdered her husband with a scythe and constantly haunting him with one eye closed and one wide open and staring, biting viciously at the blade of a scythe, and Takao, a courtesan in the drama Sendai Hagi who rejected the overtures of Lord Date no Tsunamune, choosing death instead of becoming his mistress but afterwards appearing to her lover, a ronin, in ghostly form in the smoke of the incense she had given him.