Yurei

◆ The legend

There's an old way of telling them apart: yokai haunt a place, but yurei come for a person. A yurei is the soul of someone who left this world with regrets or a grudge and couldn't pass on. They appear in the small hours of the night, when even the grass and trees sleep — and, as everyone knows, under a willow tree.

The familiar legless figure is said to have spread from ghost paintings by the mid-Edo artist Maruyama Okyo. In other words, that drifting look was an artist's invention. Before that, ghosts had feet and walked around like anyone else. Even that soft, floaty shape is a design born over a long history.