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Sexy & Scary: 02

OKIKU

Sexy & Scary: 02

OKIKU

Name in Japanese: お菊

Origin: “Bancho Sara-yashiki” (The Plate Mansion of Bancho”), 1741

A.K.A: The Plate-Counting Ghost

Gender: Female

Date of Death: Various. Early 1500s? Mid 1600s?

Age at death: Early 20s (Estimated)

Cause of death: Murder

Type of Ghost: Onryo

Distinctive features: Apparently normal-looking young woman; Voice/apparition manifests from a well

Location of haunting: Various, including Himeji and Edo

Form of Attack: Incessant counting

Existence: Fictional. We think

Threat Level: Low

Claim To Fame

Wells, particularly abandoned ones, are considered scary sorts of places all over the world—they’re dark, they’re dank, they’re deep, they’re potentially filled with who-only-knows-what sorts of creepy crawlies. But they enjoy a special sort of significance in Japanese tales of terror. Even modern-day fare such as Koji Suzuki’s Ring or Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle portray wells as channels of supernatural activity. While the story you are about to read certainly isn’t the first example of a haunted well in Japanese folklore, it is undoubtedly the most well known.

The Story

Long ago in the province of Harima, there was a beautiful woman by the name of Okiku. She worked as a maidservant for a samurai by the name of Aoyama Tessan, a vassal of the family that ruled the province from their seat of power in Himeji Castle. Tessan dreamed of ruling the province himself, and hatched a scheme to poison the lord of the castle at a party. But word of the plan leaked to its intended target, forcing Tessan to abandon the plot.

While nobody suspected Tessan’s role, the lord knew there must be a traitor nearby. So he ordered his right-hand man, Danshiro, to uncover the mole. Danshiro quickly realized that Okiku was to blame, and this is where the plot thickens, for Danshiro had long carried an unrequited flame for the girl. Confronting her with the information, he offered to cover up her involvement if she would consent to being his lover. Okiku flat out refused. And so Danshiro hatched a plot of his own: he hid one of a set of ten priceless heirloom plates, then publicly blamed Okiku for losing it, essentially giving him carte blanche to deal with her as he wished. After killing the girl, he threw her bound body down a well.

From that point on, night after night, the voice of ghostly counting began to issue from the well, slowly reaching “nine” before breaking off and beginning again, over and over, night after night. Eventually, word of the entire sordid affair reached the ears of the lord of the castle, who ordered Tessan’s suicide by disembowelment and dissolution of his family holdings.

There’s another version of the story that takes place in Edo. In the quarter of the city that was home to higher-ranking servants of the Shogun stood a mansion owned by Lord Aoyama, the representative of the province of Harima. Aoyama had arrived in Edo with a precious family heirloom — a set of ten priceless Delftware plates from the Netherlands. When his kind but clumsy young maidservant Okiku carelessly dropped and shattered one of the treasures, the infuriated Aoyama responded by cutting off her middle finger as punishment for the lost plate and locking her in the mansion’s dungeon. Somehow, Okiku managed to work her way out of her imprisonment, and flung herself to her death in the mansion’s well to escape further abuse.

Yoshitoshi’s classic portrayal of her weeping apparition materializing over the well. 1890 woodblock print.

The Attack

No matter the tale, Okiku’s manifestations always follow the same pattern: night after night, an eerie voice issues from her well, counting slowly from one to nine again and again until dawn.

In the case of Lord Aoyama, things took on an even more sinister note when his first child was born missing a middle finger.

Surviving An Encounter

Realizing this was no normal haunting, Lord Aoyama called in the abbot of the local temple to read holy sutras over the well. But the relentless counting continued unabated. One night, perhaps out of sheer frustration, the abbot shouted “ten” at the end of yet another of Okiku’s enumerations.

“Finally!” cried the voice from the well. And disappeared...

So there you have it. This is an easy one. Should a wailing, plate-counting ghost take up residence in your well, simply:

a) Grit your teeth and listen to her count.

b) At the proper moment, shout the digit that would logically come next in sequence.

c) Congratulate yourself on a spirit well appeased.

If the above doesn’t work:

d) Consider moving.

Analysis

There appears to be no fear of bodily harm from a manifestation of this sort, but the real issue isn’t the ghost. It’s the way in which she died. Okiku is essentially a stand-in for every servant who’s been mistreated by a master, and a warning to those with power to always treat those beneath them with respect. While shouting “ten” at the end of Okiku’s count caused her to disappear, the mark she left on Aoyama’s son can be seen as a symbol of the ripple effect violence has through the generations.

An Okiku-Mushi takes wing.

Trivia

Okiku-Mushi: The Swarm of 1795

For reasons yet to be science, a species of black swallowtail butterfly known as shako-ageha hatched in massive numbers that year, with the resulting cocoons filling the walls of wells throughout the Harima area. Hanging in the darkness on filaments of web that resembled tiny ropes, the pupating insects evoked the torments poor young Okiku had suffered, and locals dubbed them Okikumushi — “Okiku bugs.” The nickname remains even today.

Hokusai’s eerie take: a snake-like creature with a body made of plates, exhaling a ghostly breath. 1830 woodblock print.

The Real Deal

The temple of Chokyu-ji in the city of Hikone of Shiga prefecture owns a set of plates said to have belonged to Okiku. The story goes that they were given to the temple by her mother, so that the priests could perform a kuyo (funeral rite) over them and release her daughter’s connection to them. Today only six of the original set remain.