Banchō Sarayashiki

The ghost story of Okiku, tied to a plate and a well, told in a Himeji version and an Edo version and staged as bunraku, kabuki and a 1916 play.

The Hyogo Prefectural Museum of History says the oldest form of the Himeji telling, Banshū Sarayashiki, appears to be the one in Chikusō Yawa, a book whose colophon says a man named Nagara Chikusō wrote it in 1577. If that is true, the museum says, it is the oldest known book to carry the story. People have long argued over whether the Himeji version or the Edo version, Banchō Sarayashiki, came first, and the museum says recent opinion, based on that colophon, favours Himeji.

English Wikipedia says the story of Okiku's death first appeared on stage in July 1741, at the Toyotakeza theatre, as the bunraku play Banchō Sarayashiki, adapted by Asada Iccho and Tamenaga Tarobei I. In September 1824 the Naka no Shibai staged a kabuki version, with Otani Tomoemon II as Aoyama Daihachi and Arashi Koroku IV as Okiku.

The museum also looks at Okiku's Well, an old well in the Kami-yamazato-kuruwa enclosure two levels below the keep of Himeji Castle. The story says Okiku was thrown into it. The museum notes that Edo-period documents call it Tsurube-tori-ido, and says it probably became known as Okiku's Well in the early Taishō era, when the castle opened to the public.

Other places tell it differently. The magazine Waraku visited Chōkyū-ji temple in Hikone, Shiga, in 2022, where the tale is a love story quite unlike the familiar one, and reports that the temple holds the plate at the root of the events and Okiku's grave. In Okamoto Kidō's 1916 play Banchō Sarayashiki, Okiku tells her lord that talk of a bride coming to him from another household has weighed on her day and night, and admits she set out to test his feelings.