[2] Much of the strength of the play derives from the variety provided by the three main and distinct sections: lament for lost beauty; witty religious debate; and ghostly possession.
[3] The play begins with an encounter between two priests and an old beggar-woman, lamenting how she was “lovelier than the petals of the wild-rose open-stretched / In the hour before its fall.
Because she is seated on a Buddhist stupa, a holy marker, she is challenged by the priests for creating bad karma, but in a witty debate uses Zen-like sophistries to defeat them:[5] “Nothing is real.
[6] The priests then lament in turn her loss of beauty; before in the final sequence she is possessed by the angry ghost of a former suitor, Shōshō of Fukakusa.
He had been tasked with visiting Komachi for 100 nights in order to earn her love, but had died on the penultimate one; and his acting out of his cruelly thwarted struggles to win her love brings the play to a dramatic close, with Komachi then seeking for enlightenment and release.