Ikiryō

It is believed that if a sufficient grudge is held, all or part of the perpetrator's soul leaves the body, appearing in front of the victim to harm or curse them, a concept not so dissimilar from the evil eye.

In the tale, a commoner encounters a noblewoman and guides her to the house of a certain Senior Assistant Minister of Popular Affairs (民部大夫, Minbu-no-tayū) in the capital.

The following morning, the guide learns that the master of the house had complained the ikiryō of his former wife was present and causing him illness, shortly after which he died.

On occasion, he would be suspended in mid-air, engaging in conversation as if the girls were present before his eyes, the ikiryō's words being spoken through the boy's lips.

[20][21] The horror story (kaidan) collection Sorori Monogatari (曾呂利物語), published Kanbun 3, or 1663, includes a tale of a woman whose ikiryō assumed the shape of her severed head.

[d] One night, a man traveling towards Kyoto arrives at place called Sawaya in Kita-no-shō, Echizen Province (now Fukui City), where he mistakedly thinks he saw a chicken fly from the base of a nearby stone tower on to the road.

[f] In the tradition of the Nishitsugaru District, Aomori Prefecture, the souls of the person/s on the brink of death are called amabito, and believed to depart from the body and walk around, sometimes making noises like that of the door sliding open.

An example being a beautiful girl aged 16 or 17, critically ill with a case of "cold damage" (傷寒, shōkan), i.e., typhoid fever or a similar disease.

[25][27][28][29] In Kashima District, Ishikawa on the Noto Peninsula, a folklorist recorded belief in the shininbō (死人坊), said to appear two or three days before someone's death, which was seen passing through on its visits to danna-dera (the family temple, also called bodaiji).

[32] Therefore, pre-death soul flames may not be treated as cases of ikiryō in works on the subject of ghosts, but filed under chapters on the hitodama phenomenon.

[33][h] One case of a near-death hitodama deemed "suitable for discussion" under the topic of ikiryō by a folklorist closely resembled the aforementioned tale of the woman's head in the Sorori Monogatari, namely, that the subject who witnessed the soul's apparition pursued it ruthlessly, until he discovered the owner of the soul, who claimed to have seen the entire experience of being chased during a dream.

The subject worked at the town office of Tōno, Iwate, and one night, he reported seeing an hidama emerge from a stable and into the house's entrance where it was "flying around".

[34] Similarly, the folklore archives of Umedoi, Mie Prefecture (now part of Inabe) tells a tale about a band of men who, late in the night, spotted and chased a fireball into a sake warehouse, waking a maid who was asleep inside.

[35] The case study example is that of Yūji Kita, doomed by the kage no yamai for three generations in succession, recorded in the Ōshu Banashi (奥州波奈志, "Far North Tales") by Tadano Makuzu.