Oiwa of Yotsuya was divorced in the old text and drugged on the stage

Shinjuku City’s page for the Tamiya shrine says that the real Oiwa and her husband were a contented couple, and that the play about her came two hundred years later.³ That is not the Oiwa of the stage. The play, Tsuruya Nanboku IV’s Tōkaidō Yotsuya kaidan, opened at the Nakamuraza in 1825, and Saitō Takashi says Nanboku made it by adapting an older documentary novel, the Yotsuya zōdan.⁶⁷ In the novel it is the husband who arranges to be rid of her.¹

The old text’s bride nobody wanted

The text we could read is a printing in the Waseda series Kinsei jitsuroku zensho. Saitō counts it among the editions of the Yotsuya zōdan, which he says was published underground, most likely first in 1727, and he reports a surviving manuscript with a colophon of Kyōhō 12 (1727).¹²¹³ We have not seen a manuscript, so what follows is what the printing says, not what the 1727 text says.

It opens by naming three men of Yotsuya, the yoriki Itō Kihei and the dōshin Tamiya Iemon and Akiyama Chōemon.¹⁴ Saitō says the story came out of a scandal that ended those three real households.¹³

Oiwa is the only daughter of the dōshin Tamiya Matazaemon. Nobody will marry her because of her temper, and at 21 smallpox leaves her face drawn tight, her hair white and her back bent.¹⁵ A matchmaker called Matai’chi finds a rōnin from Settsu, and the wedding is arranged before the couple have met.¹⁶ Iemon falls for Hana, the elder of Kihei’s two concubines.¹⁷ Saitō’s summary of the 1884 edition adds the plan that follows: Iemon plays the gambler and the debauchee, beats Oiwa and sells her things, so that she herself asks to end the marriage and goes into service elsewhere.¹ The Waseda printing agrees that a letter of release is taken and her clothes are returned, and it has Iemon become Kihei’s son-in-law by marrying Hana.¹

In this version Oiwa never clearly dies. Saitō says that on learning of the plot she rages, vows revenge and disappears.¹⁸ He lists the victims of her curse as seven on Iemon’s side, three on Kihei’s and five on Chōemon’s, which we sum to 15.¹⁹

What the stage changed

The play keeps the cast and changes the reasons. The table sets the two texts side by side; the play column comes from Act 2 only, which is all of the play we read.

The new villain is the drug, and Kihei confesses it in his own words.

The Edo-Tokyo Museum’s record of a reproduced Nakamuraza programme names Kanadehon Chūshingura and Tōkaidō Yotsuya kaidan together in its title, but does not say they were played on one bill.²¹

Ryūō’s chaste wife

By 1896 the storyteller Shunkintei Ryūō had made Oiwa the opposite of the old text’s bride nobody would marry. In his book she is plain but a model of chastity, who endures Iemon’s beatings and sells her own clothes for him.²² The postscript, by Tada Seiken, calls her a wise woman of chastity and loyalty, and says that people who wrote about the Yotsuya Inari had met its divine anger.²³ We know this book only through Saitō, who quotes it.

The report of 1827

In the tenth month of 1827 two men of Yotsuya Tenma-chō, Magoemon and Mohachirō, signed a report on the origin of the Oiwa Inari. It sits as an appendix in the National Diet Library’s manuscript copy of the Yotsuya ward reports.²⁴ We read its title, its close and a handful of lines; the middle is a running hand that we could follow only in names, dates and a few words.

The report sets the Tamiya household in the Jōkyō years, 1684 to 1688, and names the year 1687.⁵ The words for divorce, 離別 and 離縁状, occur in its account of the house.²⁵ It says that after memorial rites at the temple the curses and the strange events stopped of themselves, and that in the eighth month of 1825, the month after the play’s first performance, a Buddhist name was arranged through Myōgyōji: Tokushōin Myōnen Nisshō daishi.²⁶⁶ A later entry in the same report records a lane the locals call Oni-yokochō, “demon lane”, because Oiwa, turned into a demon-woman, ran along it.²⁷

That is as far as we can set the report beside the account the city and the ward give for the shrine. They both say that Oiwa and her adopted husband rebuilt the Tamiya house together.²⁸ We could not read the sentences that join the report’s divorce words to its story, so we cannot say what the report claims happened between them.

Two shrines, one grave

Two places in Samon-chō are called Oiwa Inari: the Tamiya shrine at number 17 and the Nichiren temple Yōunji at number 18.²⁹ The city says the Inari was a household shrine in the compound of a Sakite-gumi dōshin family, worshipped by Oiwa, daughter of the first Tamiya Matazaemon; the city gives her death as 1636.²⁸ The shrine’s Yotsuya buildings burned in 1879, it moved to what is now Shinkawa in Chuo ward, and a shrine went up again at Yotsuya in 1952.³⁰

Actors went to the Shinkawa shrine. Chuo City quotes a guide of 1900 saying actors and geisha visited in large numbers, and says the actor Ichikawa Udanji IV gave the Shinkawa shrine a stone for the hundred-fold prayer in 1914, to mark his Osaka run of the play.³¹³²

Yōunji tells its own story. It says it was founded in the early Showa years by Nichiken and keeps a wooden statue of Oiwa, and that people connected with kabuki always come to pray there when a run opens.³³ Its head priest says the temple’s records give her death as the 22nd of the second month of Kan’ei 13, at 36, and that she worked to rebuild the failing Tamiya house and served her husband.⁴

Her grave is at Myōgyōji, a temple of the Hokke sect that once stood in Yotsuya and now stands at Nishi-Sugamo.³⁴ Saitō reports that it moved in 1909, and that Ryūō says he rebuilt the grave in 1868.³⁵