The Haunted House

Japan under the rule of the Tokugawa Shoguns is brought to life in this tale of the Bancho Sarayashiki , drawn from the kodan and Japanese chronicles of the seventeenth century, as it would have been told in the samurai households beneath the walls of Edo castle. The haunted house of the title is one in which the servant of a nobleman in the Shogun’s entourage has a chilling encounter with a bewitchingly lovely woman who disappears before his eyes. Drawn to the house in his turn, the nobleman discovers that it is haunted by the wronged and restless spirit of a woman who in life suffered a great wrong. Vowing on his honour as a samurai to avenge the spirit’s suffering, the nobleman is drawn into a web of tragedy, violence and death in which the code of the samurai is tested to the full.