The Onryō

Where it comes from

Onryō (written with characters meaning “grudge” and “spirit”) is the Japanese name for a ghost that harms the living because of a wrong done to it. The belief is old. Accounts of the earliest known onryō cult point to the eighth century and the death of Prince Nagaya in 729, and the idea grew in the court culture of the following centuries, when plague, drought, storms and political disasters were often blamed on the angry dead.

Over time the word became attached to ghost stories and the stage. By the Edo period (1603 to 1868) the onryō was a favorite figure in kabuki, in storytelling and in woodblock prints, and it was often a woman betrayed by a husband or master. That image, rather than the historical court ghost, is the one filmmakers inherited.

On screen

Japanese cinema returned to the onryō again and again, from the ghost films of the 1950s and 1960s to the revival of the late 1990s. Ringu (1998) placed one inside a videotape and brought the figure to a global audience, and its success opened the door to a run of films now grouped under the label J-horror.

The look the world now recognizes is long black hair hanging over a face, a white dress, a stiff or broken way of moving and an arrival through ordinary technology such as a television, a phone or a house that has been abandoned. The details come from stage and print tradition, adjusted for modern settings.

Common traits

• Driven by a grudge, usually from betrayal, abuse or an unjust death.
• Often female, and often dressed in white like a traditional burial kimono.
• Shown with long, tangled black hair that covers the face.
• Tied to a place or an object, and frequently unable to be reasoned with.
• In modern films, the curse often spreads like an infection to people who had no part in the original wrong.

Angry spirits in Japanese history

Before the onryō became entertainment, it was a political and religious problem. Court writers believed that excessive resentment could separate a spirit from the body and let it punish its enemies. The spirit of Prince Sawara was linked to illness and misfortune in the family of his brother, Emperor Kanmu. Sugawara no Michizane, a scholar and official who died in exile, was blamed after his death for the deaths of rivals and for lightning strikes on the palace.

The usual cure was appeasement. The court restored Michizane's rank and honors, and he was later enshrined as the deity Tenjin, now associated with learning. Emperor Sutoku and the warrior Taira no Masakado round out a group that Japanese tradition calls the three great onryō. A related word, goryō, refers more specifically to noble spirits who died unjustly and are honored in order to keep them calm. The shrine mound to Masakado in Tokyo is still maintained today.

Kabuki, ghost prints and the white robe

The Edo period gave the ghost its costume. Kabuki developed a standard look: a white burial kimono, long black hair that falls loose, and pale makeup with blue shadows. Artists printed the same figure on paper. The painter Maruyama Ōkyo is credited with a picture of a ghost, The Ghost of Oyuki, often described as the first example of the now-traditional yūrei, the general word for a Japanese ghost. In many images the figure floats with no visible feet and hands that droop at the wrist. Another Edo habit, the storytelling game Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai, in which a hundred tales were told by candlelight, kept the supernatural close to everyday life.

Not every ghost is an onryō, though. A yūrei may be lonely or simply lost. The onryō is the kind that holds a grudge and acts on it. The hannya mask of Noh theater, with its horns and fixed grimace, represents a female onryō, and it shows how long this idea has been part of performance.

Oiwa, Okiku and the template

Two characters did more than any others to fix the female onryō in the public imagination. Okiku is the figure in Banchō Sarayashiki who returns from a well to count plates, an image so eerie that it has been retold for generations. Oiwa, from Yotsuya Kaidan, is more influential still. The kabuki play was written by Tsuruya Nanboku IV and first staged in Edo in July 1825, paired with another long drama, and it drew crowds. Oiwa is a wife betrayed by her husband, poisoned and disfigured, and after her death she haunts him. Her drooping eye and thinning hair became her signature look, and Hokusai's picture of her in a lantern is one of the best-known ghost images in Japanese art.

The story has been filmed more than thirty times. Nobuo Nakagawa's Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan (1959) is often regarded as the finest. Productions have a tradition of visiting Oiwa's grave at Myōgyō-ji temple in Sugamo to ask for her blessing before shooting or staging the play, and some accounts say she is thought to target actresses who play her.

Ringu and the new ghost

Koji Suzuki published the novel Ring in 1991. Writer Hiroshi Takahashi adapted it for director Hideo Nakata, who had made the low-budget Don't Look Up (1996), and Toho released the film in Japan on January 31, 1998. Reports give a budget around US$1.5 million and a Japanese gross of about 1.7 billion yen, or roughly $13 million, which made it a major hit at home. A divorced journalist investigates a rumor about a videotape that kills its viewers a week later, and the film slowly reveals the identity of the dead girl behind it.

Nakata avoided showing the ghost clearly for most of the film, because he felt he had overused such images in earlier work, and relied on suggestion in place of jump scares. For the climactic walk, actress Rie Inō was filmed moving backward and the footage was reversed. The film took the onryō to new places: the curse behaves more like a virus than a case of justice, since it passes to anyone who watches, whether or not they wronged the girl. Scholars see that as a break from the older pattern.

What scholars see in the figure

Writers on Japanese horror often note that the onryō speaks for people who had no voice. Colette Balmain reads the vengeful female ghost as an old archetype that modern films use to carry fresh anxieties, with technology acting as the channel through which a repressed past returns. Ruth Goldberg, writing about Ringu, finds in it an ambivalence about motherhood, focusing on the neglect of a child by a busy parent. Others have read the film as a commentary on the status of women in modern Japan.

The same figure can be read conservatively. A story in which a woman's rage must be appeased can suggest that women are dangerous when wronged. It can also suggest that those who ignore injustice will be hunted by it. The tradition leaves room for both readings, and different filmmakers have emphasized one or the other. What stays constant is a ghost that cannot be defeated by force and has to be understood or placated, if it can be stopped at all.

J-horror and the Hollywood remakes

After Ringu, producers on both sides of the Pacific went looking for similar stories. Takashi Shimizu's Ju-On: The Grudge, which premiered in 2002 and opened in Japan in 2003 as the first theatrical film in a series that began on video, features a house-bound curse and a ghost mother, Kayako, with her son Toshio. It earned about $3.7 million and went on to have its own American remake, The Grudge (2004), also directed by Shimizu and starring Sarah Michelle Gellar. Critics at first compared it unfavorably to Ring, and its jumbled, nonlinear structure puzzled some, but its reputation has grown since. Other Japanese titles were remade as well, including Dark Water in 2005.

Gore Verbinski's The Ring (2002), written by Ehren Kruger, was distributed by DreamWorks and released in the U.S. on October 18, 2002. It reportedly cost $48 million and earned about $249 million worldwide, and Naomi Watts and Daveigh Chase led the cast. Its success opened the American market to a wave of remakes. Crossover entertainment followed, including the film Sadako vs. Kayako (2016), which put the two best-known modern onryō in the same story.

Where the figure goes next in the library

To see the modern version, start with Ringu, then read about the Supernatural Horror tradition more broadly. For another ghost-driven mystery that treats technology as a doorway, compare the dread of The Blair Witch Project, released the following year, which also made the unseen more frightening than the shown, and read about how Found Footage borrowed the idea of a recording that carries danger. The idea of sound as a creeping threat is covered in How Horror Films Use Sound to Create Fear, and the roots of the genre in silent film are in The Birth of Horror Cinema: A Short Timeline.

Verified details

• The earliest known onryō cult is linked to Prince Nagaya, who died in 729.
• Sugawara no Michizane, blamed for storms and deaths after he died in exile, was later enshrined as the deity Tenjin.
• Tsuruya Nanboku IV's kabuki play Yotsuya Kaidan was first staged in Edo in July 1825.
• Yotsuya Kaidan has been filmed more than thirty times.
• Koji Suzuki published the novel Ring in 1991.
• Ringu opened in Japan on January 31, 1998.
• Ringu's budget is reported at about US$1.5 million.
• For Sadako's walk, Rie Inō was filmed moving backward and the footage was reversed.
• The American remake The Ring earned about $249 million worldwide.
• The hannya mask of Noh theater represents a female onryō.

Sources and further reading

• Onryō, Wikipedia
• Ring (1998 film), Wikipedia
• Yotsuya Kaidan, Wikipedia
• Yūrei, Wikipedia
• Call Me Maybe: Hideo Nakata's Ring Turns 25, ScreenAnarchy
• The Ring (2002 film), Wikipedia
• Ju-On: The Grudge, Wikipedia