Yūrei-zu

Yūrei-zu (幽霊図) are a genre of Japanese art consisting of painted or woodblock print images of ghosts, demons and other supernatural beings.

[5] According to Buddhist belief, the journey from the world of the living (konoyo - この世) to that of the dead (anoyo - あの世) takes 49 days, and it is in this limbo-like phase that they can attend to unresolved issues.

[1] Scholars link the "persistent popularity"[9] of the occult to the "unsettled social conditions" prevailing during the late Edo,[2] which included the oppressive Tokugawa regime, the beginnings of westernization, and a number of natural disasters.

[10][11] Japan has long had a vibrant folkloric tradition of ghost stories, and in the early eighteenth century these began to be dramatized for the nō stage and bunraku puppet theatre.

[3] Kabuki, like ukiyo-e, was a populist art form, which aimed to satisfy the dramatic tastes of a “proletarian clientele”: the rising working and middle classes in Edo (present-day Tokyo).

[1] As Sarah Fensom notes, "that prints of the macabre, the supernatural and the grotesque were so frequently designed and distributed is for the most part a greater reflection of 19th century Japanese tastes than of the agenda of the artists.

[14] The intent of the Reforms was essentially to valorize frugality and loyalty,[15] thus ostentatious or morally dubious images such as depictions of geisha, oiran courtesans and kabuki actors were banned.

In future you are to select designs that are based on loyalty and filial piety and which serve to educate women and children, and you must insure that they are not luxurious.”[15] Given this climate of censorship, some artists used the yūrei-zu genre "to symbolically and humorously disguise … criticism of the social and political maladies of the day by having fantastic creatures appear as substitutes for real people, especially the ruling elite.

The original series, which was based on a popular game of the period involving ghost stories, included one hundred images; however, only twenty-six were published.

"[8] Although patently no longer as pervasive as during the late Edo period, yūrei-zu and contemporary variations continue to be produced by Japanese artists in various media.

1974), whose ghostly images are described as “beautiful and eerie,”[30] “dark [and] Gothic,” and “disturbing and mesmerizing.”[31] Matsui has identified a goal of her works as imparting “a condition that maintains sanity while being close to madness.”[31] Matsui’s colour on silk hanging scroll “Nyctalopia” (2005) is particularly reminiscent of classic yūrei-zu such as Maruyama’s “The Ghost of Oyuki.”[32] Another artist whose works echo yūrei-zu is Hisashi Tenmyouya (b.