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<taken from the Encyclopedia of Asian Horror>
Oiwa is a vengeful female ghost. Hideously disfigured by her unfaithful husband, she is the subject of Japanese traditional drama,, films, art prints, manga and netsuke. In the kabuki version of the legend, Oiwa’s villainous husband, Iyemon, murders his father-in-law to conceal some of his foul play. Then lusting after his wealthy neighbor’s beautiful granddaughter, he treats his pretty young wife, Oiwa, with “road blood medicine.” The potion is actually a frightful poison that disfigures before it kills. Looking in the mirror, Oiwa discovers not only a bald spot but that she has one eye completely shut and the other looking hideously upward, a image recycled for Sadako, the ghostly menace in the Ringu film series.

Out of anger and hatred for her poisoner, she dies and Iyemon thinks he is free to marry the granddaughter. He ties her and a servant he murdered to a large wooden door and dumps them in the river. The wedding day arrives but as he lifts her veil, he sees not the beautiful bride but the hideous face of Oiwa. This substitution a dead woman’s face on a living one is a theme in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” and “Morella.” The dead possesses the living and drives the living mad. Iyemon goes into a sword slashing frenzy completely severing the head of his new bride, only to see her face is not that of his dead wife, after all.

Now, Iyemon is plagued by what Thomas DeQuincey called “the tyranny of the human face.” Everywhere he looks he sees Oiwa's mutilated face, even leering from a smoldering shell of a burning paper lantern. This last apparition was the subject of a popular Shunkosai print, The Lantern Ghost of Oiwa and later reproduced as a netsuke. Oiwa’s face alternately becomes a grinning a monster, a disfigured woman and horrid cyclops, depending on the viewer’s disposition.

Despite the many awful ghostly visitations, Iyemon persists in his villiany. First, he tries to find peace by fishing in the river. He snags the door that he used to dispose of Oiwa’s corpse, and on seeing their decomposing corpses, he hears terrifying voices from the grave. Then, he tries to escape by moving to the countryside, to the inauspiciously named Hebiyama, or Serpent Mountain. His guilt begins to corrode the remainders of his reason. The vines around his cabin appear to writhe like snakes, and he sees Oiwa’s hair twisting menacingly in the coiling smoke from his lantern. Finally, Oiwa’s brother avenges her death and Iyemon suffers no more.

The moral of the play is that stepping outside the social order results in madness and death. Iyemon could not accept his lot as a lowly ronin, living off the sale of oilskin umbrellas. He ruthlessly pursued power and social position, losing all in the end.

Oiwa's talisman is, of course, the Torn Lantern.

Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan (The Ghost Story of Tokaido Yotsuya)

The masterless samurai Iyemon has fallen upon hard times. It is a constant struggle to support his beautiful but ailing wife Oiwa and their newborn child, and he grows increasingly resentful of her. He finally succumbs to temptation when the granddaughter of a well-to-do neighbor falls in love with him. Encouraged by the grandfather, who wants Iyemon as a son-in-law, he poisons Oiwa with a supposedly "medicinal" drink. She becomes horribly disfigured from the poison and dies a brutal death.
To justify his murder of Oiwa, Iyemon fabricates the story that she was having an affair with his servant, Kobotoke Kohei. He then murders Kohei, nails the two bodies to opposing sides of a door, and throws the door into a river.

Now Iyemon is free to enjoy his wedding rites.

Flush with joy, he lifts his bride's veil to kiss her--but alas, he is confronted by the terrifying visage of Oiwa instead. In a panic he cuts off her head, only to find that he has really just killed his new wife. He rushes off in horror to confess to the grandfather, but his path is blocked by the appearance of Kohei's ghost. Again he slashes off its head, this time to find that he has killed the grandfather.

Wherever Iyemon goes, he encounters the grisly spirits of those he has murdered. One day he goes fishing to seek solace, only to reel in the door with the corpses of Oiwa and Kohei attached. Terrified, he escapes to a mountain cottage, where he is continually tormented by frightening images, such as that of Oiwa's face emerging from a lantern that swings over his head. Finally Iyemon is put out of his misery when Oiwa's brother arrives at the cottage to take vengeance for his sister's death.