怪談（かいだん）
Kaidan
Strange tales: the ghost-story genre of the Edo period and after.
Kaidan means a tale of the strange, and from the seventeenth century it named a genre. Printed collections adapted Chinese ghost stories to Japanese towns, beginning with Otogi-bōko in 1666, where the peony lantern and the skeleton bride first appear in Japanese. People told them in turn at hyakumonogatari gatherings, and the kabuki theatre built summer plays around them, with Oiwa’s Tōkaidō Yotsuya Kaidan (1825) the most famous.
Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan of 1904 is the same word in an older spelling, and it carried the genre into English. Summer is still the season for kaidan in Japan, because the dead return at the Bon festival and because a shiver is said to cool you.
Related yokai
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.
Hone-onna
骨女（ほねおんな）
Sekien drew Hone-onna in 1779 as an old skeleton carrying a peony lantern, and his caption names the 1666 tale behind it: a widower's night visitor whom only an outsider saw for what she was.
Rokurokubi
轆轤首（ろくろくび）
A seemingly human figure whose neck stretches at night—and one name that once covered more than one uncanny form.
Yuki-onna
雪女（ゆきおんな）
A pale woman seen on winter roads, sometimes deadly, sometimes harmless, and never described the same way everywhere.