The Ghost of Oyuki (お雪の幻, Oyuki no maboroshi) is a painting of a female yūrei, (a traditional Japanese ghost), by Maruyama Ōkyo (1733–1795),[1] founder of the Maruyama-Shijō school of painting.[2]

The Ghost of Oyuki
ArtistMaruyama Ōkyo
Year1750
TypeInk on silk

According to an inscription on the painting, Okyo had a mistress in the Tominaga Geisha house. She died young and Okyo mourned her death. One night her spirit came to him in a dream. Unable to get her image out of his head, he painted this portrait.[3] This is one of the earliest paintings of a yūrei with the basic late-Edo period ghost characteristics: disheveled hair, white kimono, limp hands, nearly transparent, lack of lower body.[citation needed]

References edit

  1. ^ Brooks, Kit (2022). "Japan Supernatural: Ghosts, Goblins and Monsters, 1700s to Now ed. by Melanie Eastburn (review)". The Journal of Japanese Studies. 48 (2): 487–492. doi:10.1353/jjs.2022.0060. ISSN 1549-4721. S2CID 251428917.
  2. ^ Van-Veda, Jenevieve (2020), Bloom, Clive (ed.), "The Geisha Ghost", The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 1075–1090, doi:10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_64, ISBN 978-3-030-33136-8, S2CID 226768118, retrieved 23 February 2023
  3. ^ Ishii, Tatsunori; Watanabe, Katsumi (2019). "How People Attribute Minds to Non-Living Entities". 2019 11th International Conference on Knowledge and Smart Technology (KST). pp. 213–217. doi:10.1109/KST.2019.8687324. ISBN 978-1-5386-7512-0. S2CID 115195966.

Further reading edit

  • Iwasaka, Michiko and Toelken, Barre. Ghosts and the Japanese: Cultural Experiences in Japanese Death Legends, Utah State University Press, 1994. ISBN 0-87421-179-4