The wronged wife of the kabuki play of 1825, and the most widely known ghost in Japan. A prose “true record” dated a century earlier tells a plainer story: a low officer’s daughter whose face was ruined at twenty by smallpox, a marriage broken by the scheming of a superior, a disappearance, and a household destroyed afterwards. The poison, the scene at the mirror and the two bodies nailed to a door belong to the play. So, as far as anyone has been able to date it, does the belief that the play is cursed.