Okiku

The plate ghost.

This story arises from a theater play called Bancho Sarayashiki. It has become a popular legend since and represents a story of betrayal and murder and results in a beautiful young lady named Okiku becoming a Yokai.

Though there are several versions of the tale the general story goes something like this:

Okiku was a young beautiful servant to a samurai named Aoyama Tessan. He fell in love with his young servant and asked her to marry him but she refused. Because of her refusal he became angry and decided to hide one of the family’s heirloom plates. He then tricked her into believing she had lost one of them, a crime punishable by death. He offered to forgive her if she married him but she still refused. She went into a frenzy counting the plates over and over and couldn’t understand what happened to the tenth.

He decided to torture her by suspending her over a well and beating her to his own erotic enjoyment. He would lower her and raise her beating her each time and telling her if she would agree to marry him it would stop, but she still refused. Eventually, in anger, he cut the rope suspending her and she fell to her death.

In her death she became a vengeful spirit who that tormented her murderer by counting to nine and then shrieking loudly to represent the missing tenth plate or perhaps she was tormenting herself. Either way she is depicted as a ghost with a woman’s head and the body of nine plates or covering her face shamefully while nine plates float about her.