Episode 31: Botan Doro

Episode
Written By Stephanie Summar

Illustration by Warwick Goble, 1910

The Ghost Story That Shaped Japanese Horror

The ghostly sound of wooden sandals clicking down a dark street – kara-kon, kara-kon – has haunted Japanese audiences for more than 300 years. The source? A beautiful woman and her servant, who carries a peony lantern, searching eternally for her lost love. But this isn't just any ghost story – it's Botan Dōrō (The Peony Lantern), one of Japan's most influential supernatural tales.

On a new episode of Paranormal Pajama Party, we’ll examine this tale of love beyond death, which helped establish the archetype of the long-haired vengeful female ghost in Japanese horror. When handsome samurai Shinzaburō falls for the beautiful Otsuyu, their love seems destined for tragedy. Unluckily for him, even death won't keep them apart.

This ghostly tale of passion and promises reveals the impossible standards faced by samurai women – and why even death itself couldn't free them from society's expectations.

 

  • Steph: Before we begin, a quick content warning: Paranormal Pajama Party is a podcast about scary stories and legends, but there’s nothing scarier than the patriarchy.

    When discussing tales in which women are often the villains, we’ll have to unpack some stories in which women are the victims.

    This episode contains the usual amount of cursing, as well as mentions of death, sexual content and dead bodies. Please listen with care.

    Tonight’s episode involves someone who isn’t what they seem. You seem like the kind of person who never rates or reviews podcasts. Prove me wrong by giving Paranormal Pajama Party a five-star rating or review, I dare ya.

    The following is an adaptation of a story by Lafcadio Hearn, based on the Japanese ghost story Botan Dōrō, or, “The Peony Lantern”.

    Once, a wealthy samurai had a beautiful daughter, Otsuyu, who was attended by a devoted maid, Oyoné.

    One day, their family doctor visited, bringing along a strikingly handsome and gentle young samurai named Shinzaburô. Otsuyu and Shinzaburo fell in love at first sight. Even before the visit ended, they were secretly plotting a lifelong bond. As they parted, Otsuyu whispered, “If you don’t return to me, I will surely die!”

    Shinzaburô longed to see her again but, bound by etiquette, couldn’t visit alone. He waited for another chance to accompany the doctor, but the man, sensing trouble, avoided him. He feared Otsuyu’s powerful father would blame him if the romance was discovered.

    Months passed. Shinzaburô, heartsick, grew ill. When the doctor finally visited, he bitterly confronted him.

    “I’ve been sick since spring! You never called, though we planned to visit Otsuyu together.”

    The doctor hesitated, then spoke. “I’m sorry… but Lady Otsuyu is dead.”

    “Dead?” Shinzaburô turned pale. “You’re sure?”

    The doctor sighed. “I worried about her feelings for you. Her father would have blamed me. So, I stayed away. But a few days ago, I learned Otsuyu had died – and so had Oyoné. She must have died of love for you.” He forced a laugh. “It’s a sin to be so handsome that girls die for you! But what’s done is done.”

    He left hastily, guilty for his role in their tragedy.

    Shinzaburô was devastated. When he finally regained his senses, he enshrined Otsuyu’s name in his household altar, offering prayers to her daily. His grief weighed heavily, until the arrival of Obon, the Festival of the Dead.

    On the first night of Obon, under a bright moon, Shinzaburô sat on his veranda, lost in sorrow. The night was still, broken only by the murmuring of a nearby stream and the chirring of insects. Then, the rhythmic sound of wooden sandals – kara-kon, kara-kon – grew closer until it stopped outside his garden gate.

    Peering into the night, he saw two figures. One, carrying a lantern painted with peonies, was a maid. The other was a slender young woman in a long-sleeved robe embroidered with autumn flowers. They turned toward him, and he gasped. It was Otsuyu and Oyoné.

    They stopped. The girl, Otsuyu, cried out, “Shinzaburô! How strange!”

    He called to the maid, stunned. “Oyoné! But… I was told you were both dead.”

    She frowned. “And we were told you had died. What a hateful lie! Who said such unlucky words?”

    “Come in,” Shinzaburô said. “The gate is open.”

    Inside, he apologised for not visiting. “The doctor told me you had died.”

    “So it was him!” Oyoné exclaimed. “He deceived you. He told us you had died! My lady nearly became a nun in mourning, but I convinced her to keep her vow only in her heart. Then her father tried to force her into marriage. She refused, and then there was some trouble and we fled his house. We found a small house nearby, and Otsuyu’s been praying for you every day. Tonight, we went to the temples in your honour. We were on our way home when we found you.”

    “Amazing,” Shinzaburô murmured. “I’ve been praying for her, too.”

    Oyoné smiled. “She loves you so much, she would risk being disowned for seven lifetimes or even killed for you. Won’t you let her stay tonight?”

    Enraptured, he agreed. “Just be quiet – my servant is nosy.”

    The women stayed the night and returned home before dawn. They visited every night for seven nights, whatever the weather. Shinzaburo’s and Otsuyu’s love grew stronger than iron bonds.

    But one night, Shinzaburô’s servant, Tomozô, overheard a woman’s voice in his master’s room. Suspicious, he feared his master was being deceived and that the household would suffer for it.

    The next night, Tomozô peered through a gap in the shutters. In the lantern’s glow, he saw his master and a young woman speaking softly in bed. From what he could see, she was slim and graceful. Straining to listen, he heard her whisper, “If my father disowns me, will you take me in?”

    Shinzaburô held her close. “Of course. But there’s no need to worry – he loves you. What I do fear is that we’ll be torn apart.”

    She murmured, “Never. Even if I die for loving you, I will never leave you. And you, too, would not survive without me.” She pressed against him, lips at his neck.

    Tomozô shivered. Something felt wrong. He crept around for a better look. Then, his blood ran cold.

    The woman’s face was the face of a corpse. The hands caressing Shinzaburô were naked bone. Below the waist, her body faded into shadow. Where Shinzaburô saw beauty, Tomozô saw only horror.

    A sudden movement caught his eye and he was horrified to see that a second corpse, which had been standing guard by the door, had turned in his direction, as if sensing him.

    Tomozó fled in terror to the local wise man’s house, pounding on the doors until he was let in.

    The wise man listened gravely. “If what you say is true, your master is doomed. The living spirit is pure, but the dead are unclean. If he loves a ghost, he cannot live.”

    The next morning, the wise man confronted Shinzaburô, who denied everything at first. But under pressure, he admitted he planned to marry Otsuyu.

    “Madness!” the wise man cried. “The women who have come to visit you are dead! The lips of the dead have touched you! The hands of the dead have caressed you! Even at this moment I see in your face the signs of death – and still, you won’t believe! They told you where their new house is, right? Go look for it! If Otsuyu is truly alive, you’ll find her.”

    Determined to prove him wrong, Shinzaburô set out immediately and searched the entire district, asking everyone he passed about two women living alone. No one had heard of them.

    Disheartened after a long and fruitless day, he took a shortcut home through a temple. There, two new tombs caught his eye. One was small and humble. The other was grand and adorned with a peony lantern – a lantern just like Oyoné’s.

    Shinzaburô ran inside and asked about the tombs.

    “The large one belongs to the daughter of a noble samurai,” an acolyte told him. “The small one is for her servant, Oyoné, who died of grief soon after her mistress.”

    Terror gripped him. “We found a small house,” Oyoné had said. And here was a very small house.

    Shinzaburô fled back to the wise man, who gave him protective talismans. “Place these over every opening of your home, no matter how small.”

    With Tomozô’s help, Shinzaburô sealed his home before nightfall. He trembled as he waited. At two o’clock, the ghostly footsteps returned – kara-kon, kara-kon. He peered through a shutter.

    Outside, in the lantern’s glow, Otsuyu gazed mournfully at the talismans. She appeared more beautiful than ever at that moment, and his heart ached to welcome her back into his bed.

     “My love,” he heard her weep, “why have you locked me out? How could you be so cruel? Dear Oyoné, please find some way of taking me to him!”

    And the two disappeared as suddenly as the light disappears when a flame is blown out.

    Every night, the shadows came, and every night, Shinzaburô heard Otsuyu weeping.

    Tomozô the servant was being haunted, too. Oyoné visited him nightly, demanding he remove a single talisman covering a small window at the back of the house. One night, she shrieked, “If you don’t remove it by tomorrow, you’ll learn how I can hate!” Her face twisted into something monstrous.

    Terrified, Tomozô devised a plan. The next night, when the spirits arrived, he stepped outside.

    “I never meant to anger you,” he lied. “But if I endanger Shinzaburo, I endanger my own livelihood. If you give me a hundred gold coins, I will take the talisman down.”

    Oyoné and Otsuyu exchanged a long, silent look. Then Otsuyu began to weep and said, “Just let me see him once more, dear Oyoné! Please!”

    “Oh! why will you ask me to do these things?" responded Oyoné. "You know I have no money, but I suppose I must try to find it somehow.”

    And again, they disappeared.

    Another day went, and another night came, and the dead came with it. But this time no lamentation was heard outside the house, for Tomozō had found the coins on his doorstep at sunrise, and removed the talisman. The visitors found nothing to oppose their entering and they rose and passed, like vapour, through the unprotected little window.

    By midday, Tomozô finally mustered the courage to knock on his master's door. Silence. He called out, again and again – no answer. Uneasy, he forced the door open and stepped inside. In the bedroom, he hesitated before pulling back the shutters, flooding the room with light. Nothing stirred. Heart pounding, he lifted the edge of the bed curtain – then bolted from the house with a scream.

    Shinzaburô was dead – hideously dead, and his face was the face of a man who had died in the uttermost agony of fear. And lying beside him in the bed were the bones of a woman! And the bones of the arms, and the bones of the hands, clung fast about his neck.

    [MUSIC]

    Steph: Hi! I’m Steph, and this is Paranormal Pajama Party, the podcast that brings you classic ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales. Together, we’ll brush the cobwebs off these terrifying tales to shed some light on their origins and learn what they can tell us about the deep-rooted fears society projects onto women.

    If you're a fan of Japanese horror, you're familiar with ghostly women with long black hair and a grudge. These vengeful spirits had to start somewhere. Tonight, we’re discussing Japan’s most famous paranormal pajama party, and one of the most influential stories that helped establish this archetype – a little tale called Botan Doro, or “The Peony Lantern.”

    Surprisingly, Botan Doro is technically not Japanese. The story first appeared in China as part of a collection of Buddhist morality tales about what happens when you mess with karma. But in 1666, a writer named Asai Ryoi threw out all the Buddhist moralising, moved the whole thing to Tokyo, and kicked off what would become Japan's equivalent of the Victorian ghost story craze.

    The tale proved so popular that it kept evolving. In 1884, it got transformed into a rakugo – which is like a really complex one-person show – and then made its way to the kabuki stage in 1892. It was adapted one more time for kabuki in 1974, and that’s the version most people know and love today.

    By the time it reached Western audiences through Lafcadio Hearn's 1899 translation, it had already become one of Japan's "Three Great Ghost Stories," all of which, somewhat tellingly, feature a female supernatural star.

    The story has had a remarkable staying power in Japanese pop culture. It was one of the first ghost stories ever put to film back in 1910, and it really hasn't left the screen since. Between 1911 and 1937 alone, it was adapted six more times. After that, it's shown up in some form or another every decade, ranging from serious dramatic adaptations to spicier versions like the 1972 “pink film” ‘Hellish Love’. Pink films are heavy on the nudity and allusions to sex but light on anything too explicit. So this ghost story has been everything from a religious morality tale to soft-core erotica.

    And frankly, the sex itself is what makes this story so adaptable in the first place. Botan Doro is famous for two things: the "karan koron" onomotopoaeia made by the ghost's wooden sandals, and establishing something that would become a major theme in Japanese horror: the sexual encounter with a female ghost.

    So why are there so many scary women in Japanese ghost stories? The answer takes us way back to early Japanese history, when being supernaturally connected wasn't a curse – it was a source of power.

    According to the beautifully named paper, “Monstrous Wives, Murderous Lovers and Dead Wet Girls” by Jennifer M Yoo, archaeological evidence shows that women dominated early Japanese shamanic traditions, serving as spiritual mediators between the human world and the spirit world. This wasn't just a religious role; it was political. Early Japanese society was matriarchal, and female shamans could literally rule as monarchs, drawing their authority from their unique ability to communicate with the gods.

    Then Confucian ideas arrived from China, and with them, a changing social order. The new way of living focused on hierarchies, and you get three guesses about who was at the top, and your first two don’t count. Women were expected to obey their fathers as daughters, their husbands as wives, and their sons as aged mothers. Eventually, women’s social status came to depend entirely on their closest male relative. They literally did not exist as independent entities from a legal perspective.

    And by the time the Heian period rolled around in the eighth century, women’s special spiritual connection started to be seen as less of a superpower and more of a supernatural vulnerability. Buddhist ideas about female sinfulness started mixing with older beliefs about women being spiritually “unclean.” Women went from being seen as powerful spiritual intermediaries to being barred from sacred places entirely.

    Botan Doro and other ghost stories evolved alongside these changing attitudes. By the Edo period, female ghosts outnumbered male ghosts in stories more than two-and-a-half to one. And while male ghosts were usually fallen warriors or nobles with unfinished business, female ghosts were almost always defined by their emotions – particularly love, jealousy, and passion. Otsuyu can't move on to the afterlife because she's just too passionate about Shinzaburō. Her love traps her between worlds.

    The expectation that women obey their fathers, husbands, and sons hit samurai women particularly hard. The samurai class was the warrior class, and in theory, its women were expected to fight as fiercely as their male family members and die in the name of loyalty, courage, or honour. And that’s all very well, in wartime. But in peacetime, samurai became very focused on the honour part of that equation, which resulted in some extremely strict social codes, and might explain why Otsuyu is so convinced that her dad will disown her if she admits to loving Shinzaburo.

    In the Edo period’s peacetime, samurai women were increasingly confined to their homes, where they were supposed to defend their families’ honour by exhibiting domesticity and proper conduct.

    Little side note, here. This was all happening in Japan around the same time that the US was embracing the Culture of Domesticity, which we’ve talked about before, which also confined women to the domestic sphere and emphasised their subservience to men. The two countries weren’t influencing each other in this case, but they were both doing something we see again and again in global politics: After periods of disruption – warfare, in Japan’s case, and industrialisation, in the US’ case – the establishment seeks ways to reinforce order. They usually use appeals to morality or tradition to do that.

    Say you’re a male samurai who’s just come home from a long campaign where a lot of people died and a lot of stuff was destroyed. Your loyal samurai wife was defending your estate honourably with her own weapons, and now she’s getting some ideas about what she and her lady friends are capable of. Good news! You and your fellow dudes can say something like, “We need to go back to the way of life that we were fighting for!” and a whole bunch of people will agree with you because they’re very tired and ready to believe that all that destruction and death happened to defend something that is good and right. So in peacetime, we often see not only a return to traditional gender roles, but in fact, even more rigid gender roles and a lot of enthusiasm for enforcing them. Just another cool side-effect of war.

    When Botan Doro was adapted during the Edo period, Otsuyu became the poster child for Edo-period feminine ideals for her social class. She needed to appeal to both Shinzaburo and the audience. The reveal that the sweet, demure daughter of an esteemed samurai is actually a dangerous, emotionally unstable, and spiritually corrupted legless rotting corpse is way scarier that way. It’s also more tragic – her youth and beauty contrast horrifically with the decaying thing she actually is.

    Ultimately, the important thing about Otsuyu’s character is that – legless bone ghost or not, she’s still fuckable. That is… not a sentence I ever thought I’d say. Huh. Anyway, the story hinges on the horror of sex with a spectre, and to make that possible, she has to be a very sexy spectre.

    In this sense, she’s a monster girl. You may remember that we talked about this trope last season. Otsuyu ticks all the boxes: She’s young and pretty. She’s not sexually aggressive, but it’s pretty clear that Oyone is finagling that invitation for her to stay the night with a cute boy at her request.

    Even after Shinzaburo realises what she really is, he’s still pining for her. That’s monster girls for you: both alluring and terrifying, mixing seductive beauty with grotesque horror. And this is a good combo to use to scare your male audience members, who may have some anxieties – conscious or unconscious – about female sexuality, power, and autonomy.

    Misogynists might watch the kabuki version of Botan Doro and know Ostusyu was bad news from the beginning. She’s a textbook femme fatale – using trickery to fool a man into falling for her wiles, just as Tomozó the servant suspected. Women! Always deceiving nice men into believing we’re not obsessive putrefying skeletons, am I right?

    I will absolutely not argue that Otsuyu is a feminist icon. Even when her lady bones are laid bare, she still plays by all the social rules governing her behaviour. In a society where men could have concubines but women were expected to be strictly monogamous, she's completely devoted to one man. She’s only broken the rules one time, when her single-minded obsession with a man let her cross the boundary between life and death, and it’s unclear whether she had any agency in that at all, or if her uncontrollable passion left her undead until she got her way. Her entire existence, in life and in death, revolves around a man. Girl. Let him go.

    On the other hand, her maid, Oyoné, does all the heavy lifting and most of the talking in the story. And this, too, is true to Edo gender roles. Lower-class women were less restricted by social custom and had much more freedom to move around and act. I mean, they could leave the house, so that was nice.

    But Oyoné’s character didn’t escape a gendered facelift, either. She’s presented as the perfect servant, so devoted to her mistress that she died of grief. She’s an example of emotional labour taken to its extreme. Even undeaed, a state in which she’s shown to be surprisingly powerful – able to act as a wingwoman for Otsuyu, spot prying servants through the wall, and get her hands on 100 gold coins in just a few hours – she doesn’t use her abilities for what she wants. We have no idea what Oyoné’s interests are. Apparently, her only passion is helping Otsuyu fulfill hers, even though she complains about having to do it.

    So we have two women who are doing exactly what society expects them to do, and they are also monsters. But what’s interesting to me is that they are monsters because they are doing what society expects them to do. It’s a horrifyingly familiar trap for any woman.

    The popularity of Botan Doro hinges in large part on Otsuyu’s sex appeal, and the various remakes really amped that up, especially the 1970s pink film. She’s a monster, repulsive to the person who swore to love her and the other living men in the story, but hey! We might get a chance to look at her boobs before they get all creepy and corpsey, and we should definitely sneak a peek at what’s going on below her waist. Oh, it’s nothing. Because she’s a ghost.

    The paradox of being a monster girl is that you can be both objectified for your lady bits and demonised for your demon bits at the same time by the same people. She’s monstrous because she’s too sexy in exactly the way the patriarchy wanted her to be.

    Remember how I said the samurai class lived and died by its three virtues of courage, loyalty and honour? Otsuyu is the perfect samurai woman in this respect, too. She is courageous – rebelling against death itself to return from the other side of the veil night after night to visit Shinzaburo. She’s incredibly loyal. She committed herself to Shinzaburo forever on their first meeting. And when she says forever, she means forever. And she’s honourable – she’s promised herself to this man, for all eternity, and she stuck to that, too. She became a nun in her heart when she thought the samurai was dead, and refused when her father tried to marry her off to another man. She still held up her end of their promise to each other after death. 

    Meanwhile, Shinzaburo became frightened when faced with death, balked on his commitment to her, and broke his promise as soon as he realised his life was on the line.

    In the end, Otsuyu was the stronger samurai all along.

    [MUSIC]

    Steph: It’s time for lights out at the Paranormal Pajama Party. If you’re sleeping next to someone, you may want to take a peek at their knees to make sure they’re still there.

    To learn more about Botan Doro, Edo Japan, or gender roles and war, check out my sources in the show notes.

    Follow @ParanormalPJParty on Instagram to see visuals from today’s episode.

    If you’re still listening, I just wanted to touch on a bit of podcast business here at the bottom of the episode.

    First – OMG, I realised halfway through editing the last episode that I’d been saying BERWICK the whole time and the name of the town is definitely pronounced Berwick. That’s a really bad time to realise something. So instead of just replacing it every time I said it with a different recording of me going “Berwick” and it sounding crazy, I just let it go. Look at me, trying not to be a perfectionist. I’m so chill about it. I definitely don’t hate every second of it. Heh.

    Second – holy shit, it’s a horrible time to be a woman right now. It was made even more horrible recently by the allegations that have come up against Neil Gaiman, the author of “Coraline”. Seriously, men?! Quit disappointing me in exactly the same way every time. I don’t want to get into the details because the entire thing really upset me, to be honest. I also have a really hard time separating the art from the artist, personally. I wouldn’t have been able to make Season One’s episodes about “Coraline” had I known any of this, and I 100% understand if you’re listening out of order and you want to give them a miss. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a post-dated content warning, but if so, this is it.

    And one final small thing that I just really wanted you to know. I wrote this episode in Bali, where I was really hoping to get a glimpse of Rangda, queen of the demons! I tried to track down some Rangda-related sites while I was there – and mostly succeeded in thoroughly freaking out my Grab driver by asking about the Calon Arang and black magic within an hour of arriving. Admittedly not my finest cultural exchange.

    But I did get to see a Barong dance! You might remember from the Rangda episode that Barong is the lion-dog creature that embodies all the good of the universe and that he fights Rangda in a traditional dance. There are two people in the Barong costume, and watching the front half get sassy with the back half when it gets too wiggly, or seeing his wooden mask chomp at the air like a muppet, you absolutely understand why he represents goodness. He's joy incarnate.

    I also learned that some Balinese women grow their hair out specifically to donate it to mask-makers for Barong’s beard and mane. Hair and spirituality are entertwined in many cultures, and in this case, women are literally contributing pieces of themselves to create this symbol of universal good. They become part of the force that fights against darkness. I love that.

    OK, I’ll be back in two weeks with more spine-tingling tales and critical discussion. In the meantime, don’t forget: Ghosts have stories. Women have voices. Dare to listen.

From religious parable to horror classic

What started as a Chinese Buddhist morality tale transformed into something uniquely Japanese when writer Asai Ryoi adapted it in 1666. Stripping away the religious messaging, he created a story that would help define Japanese horror for centuries to come. The tale's blend of romance and terror proved irresistible, inspiring countless adaptations across kabuki theatre, film, and literature.

Samurai women and supernatural power

The story's enduring appeal lies partly in its complex portrayal of women's power in feudal Japan. Archaeological evidence shows that women once held significant spiritual and political authority as shamanic leaders. But as Confucian and Buddhist influences grew stronger, women's spiritual connection became viewed as a dangerous vulnerability rather than a source of strength.

This shift hit samurai women particularly hard. Expected to be as fierce as their male counterparts in wartime but perfectly submissive in peace, they faced increasingly rigid social codes. The ghost Otsuyu embodies this contradiction – she's the ideal samurai woman in her courage, loyalty, and honour, yet these very virtues make her monstrous.

The Monster Girl paradox

Otsuyu represents an early example of the "monster girl" trope – beautiful yet deadly, seductive yet horrifying. Her appeal lies in this duality: she's exactly what society demanded of samurai women (courageous, loyal and honour-bound) taken to a supernatural extreme. The story's horror comes not from her breaking social rules, but from following them too perfectly.

The monster's curse

Perhaps the most tragic aspect of Otsuyu's story is that even in death, she can't escape objectification. Her ghost must remain beautiful enough to seduce, yet horrifying enough to terrify. Various adaptations, particularly an erotic 1970s “pink film,” emphasized her sex appeal while simultaneously demonising her for it. She's trapped in the ultimate patriarchal paradox – monstrous precisely because she embodies the feminine ideals that her society demanded.

The enduring popularity of Botan Dōrō speaks to how effectively it captures this impossible situation. Otsuyu's ghost, forever walking the line between seduction and horror, beautiful and grotesque, devoted and dangerous, represents generations of women caught between rigid social expectations and their own desires. The clicking of her wooden sandals – kara-kon, kara-kon – echoes on, reminding us that sometimes the most terrifying ghosts are the ones we create through our own impossible demands.

Sources

Stephanie Summar
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