Long before a geisha asphyxiated her lover and mutilated him in the name of love, the deadliest woman in Japan went by the name of Takahashi O-Den. Her case was heard all around the isles of the magical archipelago. She was one of the most heard of murderous women from the Meiji Era, a deadly dokufu (“poisonous wife”), who had died in a way that was only as vicious as her acts.
O-Den seemed to be the perfect wife for the young Naminosuke, but their marriage ended up being more detrimental than any horror story you could possibly imagine. Being a young couple consumed by the new Western vices that had invaded the land of the Rising Sun, she and her husband fell into the vice of gambling. After that, things all went straight downhill. Impoverished and with little access to hygiene, O-Den’s husband fell ill to leprosy. The medicine wasn’t cheap at the time and, in order to pay its expenses, she decided to work at the docks of Yokohama port as a prostitute in order to get enough money to keep her husband alive. Nevertheless, he didn’t manage to pull through. Because of the strangeness of the situation, some people claimed that she had actually killed him with poison.
After the death of her husband, O-Den kept on making a living as a prostitute until she met a low-life thief by the name Ogawa Ichitaro, who swept her of her feet and convinced her to rob one of her rich clients. A silent night in October from 1876, after meeting with her customer, she waited until the man was asleep and quietly slit his throat. But she didn’t really get much money off him. Trying to hide her mess, she wrote a false suicide note and put it over the corpse of her client. However, the Japanese police managed to follow her steps and made her face justice. After a long trial, that spanned almost two years, she was sentenced to death by beheading.
On the day of her execution, two years and a half after killing her client, she walked stoically to her death until the last moment. Then, she lost her nerve and begged her jailers to meet with her beloved rascal Ichitaro in a fit worthy of a whiny teenager. Intending to control O-Den, the executioner unsheathed his sword and swung it at her neck so that she would calm herself down before her last seconds on Earth. Yet, she moved furiously and botched the back of her head with the blade, bleeding profusely and crying in pain. At the gruesome sight, the executioner had to take her down and sever her head from her body in one swift blow.
The scene was so grotesque and nauseating that, after the incident, Japanese authorities banned beheadings altogether and gave way for hanging as a more reliable method for execution. Yet, even though the authorities tried to do their best to make the case of O-Den’s death less notorious, it seemed as though the medics at the time wanted to see what a dangerous woman was made of. Their eagerness took them to dissect up O-Den’s corpse in an autopsy, and, furthermore, they decided to preserve her female organs in formaldehyde. The organs remained in the solution and were even displayed as a part of an exhibition organized by the Tokyo metropolitan government after the Second World War.
Her intimate parts, however, were not the only thing that would be preserved by the Japanese. At the time of her dissection, the people had already obsessed over the case of this deadly dokufu, and the dramatists of Tokyo seized her story and decided to make a tragic Kabuki play about her. Since this type of theater was an all-men’s game, it was actually an actor —Kikugoro V, one of the city’s renowned onnagata— who had the honor of playing the role of the deadly O-Den.
After the dramatic representation of O-Den’s story in the play, her story was translated on to the screen twice. First, it was in a flick directed by Nobuo Nakagawa that went by the name Dokufu Takashi O-Den, translated in English as A Wicked Woman. Nakagawa twists on the story, and instead of presenting the woman as a murderess, he portrays her heroically as a loving mother who has to support her daughter and her second marriage in a deadly thriller filled with vice and romance. Later, Shogoro Nishimura used her story as an inspiration for Koyamu or Crimson Night Dream (1983), an erotic docudrama that circles around her story, portraying her as a victim of her circumstances, who only committed crimes to support her husband.
Despite losing her head and having her organs placed in a pickled jar, O-Den managed to live on as a terrifying and perplexing legend.
You Might Be Interested In:
The Day A Geisha Asphyxiated Her Lover And Mutilated Him In The Name Of Love
22 Pictures Of The Japanese Mafia That Runs Tokyo
Sources:
Criminal Element
Christine Marran
