A large paper lantern floats above a small, frowning man. The lantern is Oiwa. Her hair streams down its sides, one eye droops, and her face is stretched across the paper. The man, Iemon, sits on the ground with his hand on his sword, staring up at her. The Metropolitan Museum of Art dates this woodblock print to 1832 and attributes it to Shunbaisai Hokuei, an Osaka printmaker known for portraits of kabuki actors.
The print records a scene from Yotsuya Kaidan, a kabuki play by Tsuruya Nanboku IV first staged in 1825 and still the most famous ghost story in Japanese theater. Iemon betrays and murders his wife Oiwa. He has her poisoned, and the poison disfigures her face, and the drooping eye in the print is a direct reference to that disfigurement. Her spirit comes back for revenge. In the Met's description, it is Oiwa's spirit that sets the lantern alight.
The idea of the ghost as a lantern comes from Katsushika Hokusai's One Hundred Ghost Stories, which showed Oiwa's face in just this form, and the print's title says as much. The man in the print is the actor Arashi Rikan II, drawn in his role as Iemon. Kabuki performers have long treated Yotsuya Kaidan with great respect, and companies are said to visit a shrine connected with the story before staging it.
Kabuki Actor as Iemon appears on our: