What Is a Yurei? The White-Robed Dead of Edo Books and Stage

Picture the hour the old stories prefer: about two in the morning, a graveyard path, a willow leaning over a river. Something pale stands there. It is dressed in white. Its arms hang bent from the elbows and its lower body seems to melt into the dark. Almost anyone who has seen Japanese pictures knows this figure at once. It is called a yurei, and the picture is younger than the belief behind it. The belief is old: a soul that could not move on because of anger, grief or attachment. The familiar picture was assembled in the Edo period from funeral clothing, printed books, theater and a game played by lamplight. This page separates those layers and says which sources prove what.

An old word with a changing face

The word is written with two characters meaning, roughly, "faint" and "spirit." Its oldest example in the dictionary Nihon Kokugo Daijiten is a court diary entry of 1089, where it simply names the souls of the dead in a Buddhist memorial rite. Nothing in that use is frightening.

The frightening sense appears later. The same dictionary quotes the Noh play Funa Benkei, dated there to about 1516, in which the warrior Taira no Tomomori announces himself as a yurei. In Noh, such figures come to say something or to ask for prayers.

A scholar's entry in the Heibonsha encyclopedia adds a change of manner. Older ghosts appeared as they had looked in life. In the Edo period they came to appear as the dead who had been laid in a coffin, and their motive shifted toward revenge and clinging love, with scenes growing more gruesome. The entry also notes that, rarely, the spirit of a living person can slip free and appear in the same way.

What the printed record shows

Dates for the books come from the Heibonsha entry and are as it states them. We did not read the books themselves.

The white robe

The costume is a funeral costume. The kyokatabira is a white unlined robe of hemp or cotton, sewn with the thread ends left unknotted, and written over with a Buddhist name-invocation, a mantra or a sutra title. The belief behind it was that a person buried in it would be spared the torments of hell. Putting it on the dead seems to have begun in the Shingon school around the Kamakura period, according to the encyclopedia.

The Edo-period ghost wears this white, and often a small triangle of white paper on the forehead. So the audience read the figure as dead before it spoke.

Feet, or no feet

Here the sources are honest about gaps. The Heibonsha entry says that from about the Kyoho years (1716 to 1736) the lower body of ghosts grew hazy, and later the elbows bent and the hands drooped. It names no single inventor. It ties the fixed look partly to literature and the stage, including works such as Bancho Sarayashiki and Yotsuya Kaidan.

Popular accounts credit the painter Maruyama Okyo (1733 to 1795) with the first modern yurei. The Wikipedia page on his painting is more careful, calling it one of the earliest, and it gives a date of 1750 that we could not confirm in a museum record. Treat "first" as unproven.

Telling it in the dark

The hundred-tale gathering was an evening game. A hundred lights were lit, one was put out after each frightening story, and when the last went dark around two in the morning something strange was said to appear. The encyclopedia says it was practiced in the Edo period among samurai as a test of nerve, and traces its roots to the Muromachi-period night parades of demons (see Tsukumogami).

The earliest dated text that names the game is a little odd. It is a printed collection of a hundred comic tales from 1659, and its preface says the writer had heard that a hundred tales always call up something fearful, tried it, and laughed when nothing came. Many more books on the theme followed, among them Shin Hyaku Monogatari and Otogi Hyaku Monogatari. So the fear and the joke grew up together.

Painters joined in. Hokusai's series of about 1830 drew on the same game, though only five prints were finished. They include the wronged wife Oiwa and the murdered Kohada Koheiji, both returning for revenge.

Rakugo storytellers made ghost tales a genre of their own. San'yutei Encho (1839 to 1900) collected ghost paintings, and in 1906 his patrons, the Fujiura family, gave fifty to Zenshoan temple in Tokyo, which shows them each August.

Common mix-ups

• Yurei and obake are not the same. The Heibonsha entry says a yurei appears in a form someone can recognize and goes to a chosen person. An obake keeps to a fixed place and time, takes another shape and frightens anyone.
• Not every yurei seeks revenge. The vengeful kind has its own name, Onryo. Folk tales also tell of a mother who returns to nurse her child. Drowned sailors have their own line of tradition, Funayurei.
• The picture is not the belief. Funeral rites, memorial services and offerings to wandering souls were the practice meant to keep the dead from becoming restless.

How to read a ghost picture

• Date it first. A book of 1688 and a print of 1830 do not show the same ghost.
• Check the clothing. White burial dress points to funeral custom.
• Look at the lower body. Legs, a hazy waist or nothing at all each tell you something about the period.
• Ask who made it: a stage, a printer, a storyteller or a painter.
• Find the earliest dated source and say what kind it is.