Chochin-obake and Oiwa: Hokusai's Lantern and the Yotsuya Ghost Story

What makes chochin-obake eerie is that a light meant to guide you through the night suddenly becomes a face. People in Edo-period Japan seem to have known this feeling well: in ukiyo-e prints and on the kabuki stage, faces peer out of lanterns. Let's follow the thread between lanterns and ghost stories.

The lantern, a trusty companion on dark roads

A chochin is a lantern made by stretching washi, Japanese paper, over a thin bamboo frame, with a candle burning inside. When it's not in use, it folds flat like an accordion. There were many kinds, shaped to suit their use: some to carry by hand, others to hang from the eaves.

Before electric lights, you couldn't walk the roads at night without one. Its soft glow through the paper made it a reliable companion in the dark. But washi tears easily. When an old lantern's paper splits, the long sideways tear starts to look like a mouth. And if the flickering candle inside lights up the back of that mouth... The figure of chochin-obake may well have been born from imaginings like that.

Hokusai's "Oiwa"

When people talk about lanterns and ghost stories, a print by Katsushika Hokusai often comes up. Hokusai made a series of ghost-story prints called "One Hundred Ghost Stories" (Hyaku Monogatari), and in one of them, "Oiwa," a torn lantern becomes the face of the ghost Oiwa herself.

The roundness of the lantern and its torn paper are drawn so they read as a face, as if the object and the ghost had melted into one. With nothing more than a single lantern, Hokusai captured the creepiness of a human face floating in a light.

Yotsuya Kaidan and the lantern trick

Oiwa is a woman in Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan, a kabuki play by Tsuruya Nanboku. Cruelly betrayed, she loses her life and returns as a ghost to settle the score. It's one of the most famous ghost stories in Japan.

The play is known for a stage trick called chochin-nuke, "slipping out of the lantern," in which Oiwa's ghost emerges from inside a lantern. A ghost suddenly pushing out of a dimly glowing lantern is said to have thoroughly frightened audiences.

Oiwa is a yurei, a ghost, and not chochin-obake itself. Even so, through Hokusai's print and the lantern on stage, the image of "a face appearing in a lantern" must have burned itself into many people's minds.

When your night-road companion grins

Chochin-obake is often drawn alongside Karakasa-obake as one of the classic yokai born from everyday objects. Among all the tools that were believed to gain a spirit after long use, the lantern may be the one that suits a scare best. It's precisely because this light usually keeps your steps safe that being stared at by it is such a shock.

What's more, once a candle is lit inside, the whole paper glows. Its eyes and mouth are lit from within rather than from outside, which may be why it seems more alive than other haunted objects.

On Chochin-obake's Yokaipedia page, you can meet a pixel-art chochin-obake with its tongue poking out of the tear. Next time you see lanterns glowing at a summer festival, take a quiet look and make sure none of the tears are looking back at you.