the pale moon as it drifted through the clouds, and even on the very pillow in which he slept. The spirit of Oiwa hovered over him wherever he turned. It floated over him in every step he took, glowing in cold flames. At times a voice whispered a great anger and a fierce desire for revenge, “May your tendons and bones be closed up, be broken, be melted, be washed away!!”
The samurai went to the nearby river to seek solace, but instead he visualized wooden doors and planks with its load of mutilated corpses with the terrible voices of the demons issuing from them. Yotsu-ya, fled in terror to a hut on the Ontake-San, the Snake Mountain, where spirits and demons fear to tread. Yet the ghost of his wife Oiwa continued to torment him. She appeared to him in terrible guises; at times her head was bald, one of her eyes staring upwards and the other was swollen and closed in her crooked face. And, at times the ghostly image floated above him with a wide mouth stretching from ear to ear, sharp horns and all-seeing eyes.
Everything was confusion to him. His body was buffeted by the Shina-Tsu-Hiko, the wind god; thundered at by Kami-Nari, the god of rolling thunder; and chased through the mountains by 0-Yama-Tsu-Mi, the lord of the mountains. His drove the samurai, Yotsu-ya to the Miyajima, the ‘middle country between the land and the underground’. As he crossed the bridge of several leagues, which spans the river How-Nai-ho, he fell into the rushing waters beneath. The air of life was denied and his soul escaped from the corrupted flesh.
The swift flowing waters carried the soul of the samurai, Yotsu-ya to the Jigoku, the underground realm of the Lord Yama-raja, the fierce ruler of the nether regions; the eight regions of hell and