Usually translated as the Japanese god of death, and the one thing it has never had is a cult. The word is first written in a puppet play of 1709, where it lures two lovers to their deaths, and for two centuries it stays a figure of speech. Japanese scholars writing about it in the 1920s and 1930s illustrate it with Yama, Osiris and Hel, because there is nothing nearer to hand. The bargaining figure at the sickbed, with the candles, comes from a Meiji storyteller adapting a European tale.