Japanese cinema in the 1990s and 2000s produced two of the scariest movies put to film. The first was Ring (1995) which featured a cursed tape that, when watched, would cause the vengeful spirit of a woman called Sadako to kill the viewer. The second, released in 2002 was Ju-On which depicted a cursed house in Tokyo where the spirits of a murdered family come back and kill whoever steps foot in the house. These two films spawned entire franchises including video games, American remakes, and even a crossover film. However, both depict a staple of Japanese folklore, the onryō. Onryō are not just simply ghosts, but specifically venegful ghosts. On means ‘grudge’ and ryō means ‘spirit’ meaning onryō literally translates to a vengeful spirit. For 2026’s Month of Horror we will focus on these spirits and specific ideas of onryō in Japanese folklore.
Ghosts in Japan
One thing common across world cultures are beliefs that an aspect of the dead can come visit the living, crossing the mortal veil between the afterlife and the mortal world. The Irish celebration of Samhein, which evolved into Halloween, is celebrated at a time when it is believed that the veil between our world and the afterlife is at its thinnest, and the spirits of the dead can pass into our world. While this is potentially a time to be fearful in Ireland, in Mexico it is a time of joy. Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) combines indigenous festivities with the Catholic All Saints’ Day, and people celebrate the spirits of their deceased loved ones returning. Japanese belief in spirits has been influenced by both local beliefs and Confucian and Buddhist concepts introduced from China and Korea. Principally, as Michiko Iwasaka and Jennifer Yoo both highlight, there is the konoyo (the world here) and the anoyo (the world over there) creating a spatially indistinct spirit world that Shinto, Confucian, and Buddhist beliefs can all accept.
Japanese spirits can be classified as yōkai, bakemono or yūrei. Yōkai and bakemono are broad categories of supernatural and preturnatural beings, both which can include ghosts. However, for the purposes of today’s post the more important category is that of yūrei meaning ‘faint spirit’. Some of the stories of yūrei developed from early-Shinto ancestor cult practices, some of which continue today with the Obon festival, sometime between August and September, where the living come together and honour the spirits of the ancestors. As Iwasaka argues, the dead have a keen interest in the living, so will return to intervene in the lives of their descendants. However, not all yūrei are simply ancestors visiting their living relatives, but are instead those trapped in some form of liminality. These are the spirits of the living tied to a specific place, but are not truly in our world and cannot move onto the anoyo. Being unable to pass on could be caused by a violent death, improper burial ritual, or having unfinished business. Most of these stories came from either the Heian era (794-1185) or the Edo era (1600-1868) which were periods of unprecedented peace and political centralisation. The Heian set the groundwork and the Edo made the genre flourish. During the Edo yūrei stories became an entire genre called kaidan, or strange tale, that even began a game. A group would gather at night and light 100 candles. The group would tell kaidan, and with each story they would snuff out a candle until all light was put out, and potentially summoned a yūrei. One famous depiction of a yūrei was by painter Ōkyo Maruyama’s The Ghost of Oyuki, which we have discussed here, in 1750 after he was visited in the night by the ghost of a deceased mistress called Oyuki.
The Vengeful Spirit
When you die, according to Japanese spirit beliefs, the last thoughts going through your mind determine your afterlife. Those who die with feelings of hatred or burning vengeance return as onryō, although political elites who died because of political intrigue will come back as the similar goryō. Most depictions of onryō are of women, often wearing a white robe or burial kimono, and in more recent depictions with their hair loose covering most of their face. These are the onryō you will more likely see in media as this is the form popularised during the Edo period, and was then spread through kabuki theatre and kaidan. However, the earlier depictions of onryō were mostly male and were goryō during the Heian period. One of the most notable goryō was Michizane no Sugawara (854-903). He had been a key minister who threatened the monopoly of power of the Fujiwara clan in the Heian court, so they accused him of treason leading to his exile to Kyushu in 901. In 905 one of his attendants built a shrine to Michizane in what Allan Grapard described as one of the earliest goryō cults. In the next two decades members of the Fujiwara clan who had plotted against Michizane died under mysterious circumstances culminating in the imperial palace catching fire in 930 during a thunder storm. One of Michizane’s accusers died in the fire. One of the courtiers apparently had a dream where Michizane said he would continue to plague the court unless given a cult following which evolved into the Kitano shrine-temple complex by the 980s.
Most of the most noted stories of the onryō come later during the Edo period. Many of the older stories were now applied to the masses, where kabuki theatre especially allowed stories of onryō to cross class boundaries. With the onryō the area is cursed where the vengeaful onryō could cause natural disasters like earthquakes, forest fires, and storms. The onryō was either invisible or appear as they did in life, except that they were pale and wearing white (either a robe or burial kimono). In kabuki theatre the performers often wear masks so people sitting further away from the front could tell the emotions of the performers. This has meant that onryō have been associated with hannya masks which are typically feminine and associated with demons. While most stories of onryō feature a victimised woman, as Jennifer Yoo has argued, we are not meant to sympathise with the onryō. They are meant to be harmful beings even if they started out as a victim.
Oiwa and Okiku
There are two notable stories of onryō, although one could be more accurately described as a regular kaidan instead of an onryō story. We will return to analysing the tales after we go through the narrative. The main oryō story that I want to discuss is the murder of Oiwa. From the Yotsuya Kaidan, first performed in 1825, that features a samurai called Iemon who wishes to abandon his sickly wife Oiwa for another woman, Oume, who also is in love with him. This is despite the fact that Iemon murdered Oiwa’s father when he refused to grant Iemon the right to marry his daughter, and ever since Iemon has been claiming to Oiwa that he is trying to find her father’s killer. Meanwhile, Oume’s granfather, Kihei, as a way to make it easier for Iemon to abandon Oiwa has a nurse visit the sickly Oiwa with ‘medicine’ which disfigures her. Seeing her reflection drives Oiwa to desperation and she kills herself. This causes her to return as an onryō, haunting Iemon and causing the deaths of the members of Kihei’s family. Performers would play her wearing a mask with a large eye to represent her injuries from the poison. The play ends with Iemon, isolated in the mountains, being driven insane by Oiwa until he is mercy killed.
The other tale has been classified as an onryō one, although it is not as explicit as Yotsura Kaidan so has been seen as being another kaidan. Banchō Sarayashiki began life as a folk story that in the mid-1700s was formally recorded and turned into a full play which has been adapted several times. This kaidan revolves around Okiku, a maid working in a castle, something Himeji Castle, who caught the eye of the castle’s samuari lord. The samurai had ten ceremonial dishes which Okiku was in charge of taking care of, so he used this to force her into a relationship. One day he hid, or broke, a dish, and a distraught Okiku kept counting to nine as she tried to find the last dish. The samurai offered her a chance to ‘redeem’ herself – become his lover. Okiku refused so the angered samurai had her beaten and thrown into a well where she died. From there Okiku became an onryō, but her haunting would be different. From the well every night she would repeatedly count to nine and scream at ten. Depending on the telling changes what happened next. In some tellings the samurai’s guilt drove him to suicide, in others a monk came to perform an exorcism before the samurai did this. The monk broke the curse by yelling ‘ten’ – Okiku now had the tenth dish and her soul became at peace.
Especially with Banchō Sarayashiki, these tales have slight changes depending on the adaptation, and with it they became two of the three ‘great kaidan’. These two stories also inspired the famous J-horror franchises – The Ring and Ju-on. In both tales the onryō were depicted with long, unkempt hair in white clothing which came to influence both Kayako from Ju-on and Sadako from The Ring. Like Oiwa, Kayako was a wife murdered because of a selfish husband whose eye becomes a noted part of her image, and, like Okiku, Sadako was beaten and cast into a well where numbers came into their story. The introduction of both Oiwa and Okiku represent the preservation of societal hierarchies. Oiwa is the devoted wife and daughter respecting her position while Okiku is a diligent worker who respects her class standing. Their deaths cause an inversion of societal norms, so much so that we are expected to lose sympathy for the onryō and see them as antagonistic. Instead of patriarchal and class hierarchies the female onryō upend this, even down to their hair. In Edo Japan hair styles were a marker of class, so the mass of hair of the onryō fully disrupted class as now their class could not be seen.
Gender and Onryō
Technically, onryō are not gendered, and anyone who died with strong feelings of vengeance or hatred could become an onryō. However, from the Edo period onryō in particular came to be associated with women. As Jennifer Yoo has argued, the female onryō represents a patriarchal attempt to maintain control over a monstrous female. We would naturally be sympathetic to onryō – they are often women who have faced abuse and have been murdered by their spouse. However, their femininity is broken down and transformed into the monstrous whose anger impacts all those around her. Oiwa wipes out an entire family; Okiku’s counting torments others, not just the samurai. In some adaptations the samurai is not punished – one adaptation from the 1910s has the samurai kill himself to specifically be with Okiku. Far from punishing him he is rewarded by being with the woman he brutalised. This is especially the case when we compare onryō to the more traditionally masculine gonryō. The gonryō are appeased by becoming figures of worship, kami, whereas onryō face exorcism.
Onryō Today
The inclusion of onryō in popular culture has continued, the kabuki theatre and kaidan stories of the previous century ensuring their place in contemporary culture. Kaidan stories featuring onryō were some of the first to be adapted to Japanese cinema, and the earlier mentioned Edo onryō stories have been adapted several times into movies. As referenced throughout we also have two major J-horror franchises revolving around onryō: The Ring and Ju-on. The Ring began as a 1991 novel by Koji Suzuki, and revolves around a cursed video tape featuring horrific images and a well. The video tape is a vector for an onryō called Sadako, a young psychic woman who was abused by her adopted family and cast down a well. She would eventually die down there and her vengeance would transform her into an onryō through a cursed video tape. Whoever watched the tape would have seven days to live before Sadako made them die of fright; the only way to break the curse would be to make a copy of the tape and continuing the cycle. In 1998 two short movies, Katasumi and 4444444444, would provide the basis for Ju-on. This franchise revolves around a cursed house, whoever enters the house is destined to die, and wherever they die also becomes infected by the curse. This curse is caused by an onryō called Kayako who was murdered by her jealous husband alongside her son, Toshio, and cat. The spirits of the three victims became a vengeful curse.
Both Sadako and Kayako reflect many of the earlier stories of onryō where their hatred spills over from those who wronged them to impact those around them. However, while in many onryō tales feature a way to break the curse this does not work in Ring and Ju-on which, instead, sees the curse expanding. The only time that it seems that the curse is broken was the movie that set them against each other, and instead of breaking the respective curses it fuses them together. However, what continues with older stories is that by becoming onryō we can only see them as monsters, not as beings to pity. Onryō continue in popular culture with the recent video game Ghost of Yōtei picking up the story. Set in early-Edo Japan the protagonist is avenging her murdered family becoming a physical onryō.
Bibliography:
- Theresa Bane, Encyclopedia of Spirits and Ghosts in World Mythology, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2016)
- Zack Davisson, The Ultimate Guide to Japanese Yokai: Ghosts, Demons, Monsters and Other Mythical Creatures from Japan, (Tokyo: Tuttle, 2024)
- Allan G. Grapard, ‘Religious Practices’, in Donald Shively and William McCullough, (eds.), The Cambridge History of Japan: Volume 2, Heian Japan, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 517-575
- Michiko Iwasaka and Barre Toelken, Ghost and the Japanese: Cultural Experience in Japanese Death Legends, (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1994)
- Keisuke Nishimoto, Strange Tales from Japan: 99 Chilling Stories of Yokai, Ghosts, Demons and the Supernatural, Translated by William Scott Wilson, (Tokyo: Tuttle, 2021)
- Dan O’Sullivan, ‘Japan’s Onryō Spirits Inhabit a Purgatory of Revenge and Cosmic Rage’, Atlas Obscura, (27/10/2020), [Accessed 19/10/2026]
- Jennifer Yoo, ‘Hair becomes her: Presenting the ‘monstrous’ feminine in Japanese horror’, Asian Cinema, 36, (2025), 225-237
- Jennifer Yoo, ‘Monstrous Wives, Murderous Lovers, and Dead Wet Girls: Examining the Feminine Vengeful Ghost in Japanese Traditional Theatre and Horror Cinema’, Unpublished PhD in Philosophy, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, (2022)
