The Ghost of Oiwa in Actor Prints: Confronting Disfigurement.
- Resource Type
- Article
- Authors
- Shimazaki, Satoko
- Source
- Impressions (10952136); 2007, Issue 29, p77-97, 21p, 17 Black and White Photographs
- Subject
- Language
- ISSN
- 10952136
The article discusses on prints created in Edo Japan that focuses on the representation of disfigurement of ghosts. The prints are part of illustrated fiction in the form of small picture books called gokan or combined booklets that were created as a catalog of kabuki plays. The particular depiction of Oiwa as the fictional misshapen ghost is purportedly adapted by Tsuruya Nanboku IV in his 1825 ∣Tokaido Ghost Stories at Yotsuya,∣from the accounts of Iwa, a Genroku era (1688-1704) woman who was disfigured as a result of smallpox in her youth and was betrayed by her husband. In the eighteenth-century, manuscripts that have characters that adapted Iwa's stories depicted her as a vengeful ghost after her lonely demise.