Onryō

Within the supplied sources, onryō are not presented as originating from a single cosmogonic tale but as a folkloric category: persons who died having suffered grave wrongs and who, after death, return to the world of the living to exact vengeance. Literary and cinematic adaptations (for example the film Kuroneko) treat onryō as spirits of specific wronged individuals—in Kuroneko, a woman and her daughter-in-law killed by samurai—whose posthumous return is driven by injustice experienced in life rather than by an elemental origin myth.

The provided materials do not establish a single canonical visual description for onryō; instead, they describe them in behavioral and emotional terms (vengeful, cruel, deranged, egotistical, bloodthirsty, heartless). Filmic examples (such as Kuroneko) depict specific onryō as female human spirits, but the supplied sources do not document a uniform physical form or standard iconography across the tradition.

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.