Japanese Buddhist and Shinto folk belief describes a properly departed soul as passing through a series of memorial rites toward eventual union with the ancestors, becoming a kind of collective protective spirit for the family. The yurei is what results when that passage is interrupted: a death that was sudden, violent, unavenged or simply unattended by the correct funerary rites leaves the spirit stranded, unable to move on and bound instead to the place, person or grievance connected to its death. Edo-period kabuki and ukiyo-e prints fixed the now-familiar image, a figure in a white burial kimono with long disheveled black hair and no visible feet, drifting rather than walking, which visually marks the yurei as no longer bound by the rules of embodied life.
Unlike Western revenants, the yurei is rarely malicious by default; its state is one of unresolved attachment, most often to a specific grudge, a specific person, or an unfinished task, and traditional remedies mirror that specificity, since a yurei is typically released not through banishment but by resolving whatever kept it tethered, whether that means recovering a body for burial, avenging a wrong, or simply being remembered correctly.