Onryō

Belief in onryō develops within Japanese cosmologies that link emotional imbalance or untimely/unjust death to harmful spiritual agency. Historical records and later narratives attribute episodes of tatari to the wrath of the dead (examples in court histories include Prince Nagaya, Fujiwara no Hirotsugu, Prince Sawara, and Sugawara no Michizane). The related idea of ikiryō—a soul or spirit becoming unbalanced and separating from the body when hatred or resentment accumulates—provides the conceptual mechanism by which the living become or produce onryō.

Accounts emphasize variation but point to recurrent cultural motifs: onryō are often depicted as wronged women in literary and theatrical contexts. Performing arts use visual conventions such as the hannya Noh mask to represent a female onryō; modern popular imagery commonly shows a young woman in white burial kimono with long, disheveled black hair obscuring the face (the "stringy-haired ghost girl" trope). There is no single canonical physical template recorded in the surveyed sources.

Sources characterize onryō chiefly by their capacity to harm the living as retribution: injuring or killing those who wronged them and, in some descriptions, causing large-scale effects such as natural disasters to accomplish vengeance. They are described as acting to 'redress' grievances and are often said to take vengeance so forcefully that they 'take the spirits from the dying bodies' of victims (phrase attested in the referenced summary). The tradition emphasizes motive—revenge for past injury—more than a fixed catalog of supernatural techniques.