百物語（ひゃくものがたり）
Hyakumonogatari
The game of a hundred ghost stories, one candle put out after each.
A hundred wicks are lit in a room. Each guest tells a strange story and puts one out, and the room darkens story by story; after the hundredth, something is supposed to appear. The game was fashionable among samurai and townsmen in the seventeenth century, and most players are said to have stopped at ninety-nine.
The printed collections took their names from it: Shokoku Hyakumonogatari in 1677, Otogi Hyakumonogatari in 1706, and Ehon Hyaku Monogatari in 1841, which gave each tale a picture and a place. Hokusai’s print series of about 1831, also called Hyaku Monogatari, is where Oiwa’s face peers out of a paper lantern.
Related yokai
Isonade
磯撫で（いそなで）
In the 1841 Ehon Hyaku Monogatari a shark-like creature of the western sea attacks with its tail — and in Kumano in 1960 the name was still the thing people said when someone died at the shore.
Futakuchi-onna
二口女（ふたくちおんな）
The 1841 Ehon Hyaku Monogatari made Futakuchi-onna a stepmother punished with a mouth at the back of her head. Folktales of the wife who eats nothing, recorded in the twentieth century, give the same hidden mouth to brides who turn out to be snakes, spiders, and oni.
Oiwa
お岩（おいわ）
Oiwa is the wronged wife of Tsuruya Nanboku's 1825 kabuki play Tōkaidō Yotsuya Kaidan — poisoned under the name of medicine, betrayed, and returning to pursue her husband. On stage, she emerges from a burning lantern.