The Ghost Writer's Wife

2

Locations

1

Countries

2025

Year

Meiji-era Matsue. Matsuno Toki, daughter of a high-ranking samurai house undone by the end of the shogunate, is an odd young woman with an appetite for ghost stories. When her father's venture collapses and the household slides into poverty, she takes work as a live-in maid for the foreign English teacher newly posted to the town. He is an Irishman born in Greece, left by his parents as a child, passed between relatives and adrift ever since. The two struggle with the language, then recognize how closely their lives rhyme, and begin trading ghost stories night after night. A 125-episode NHK morning serial, fictionalized from the life of Koizumi Setsu, wife of Lafcadio Hearn, with names and events reworked.

The two locations want opposite hours. Kishi Park on Lake Shinji is a sunset stop and nothing more. The lake scene broadcast on December 26, 2025 was shot there, and sunset in Matsue moves by more than an hour across the year, so look up the time for the day you go and stand at the water half an hour early. Yaegaki Shrine is the daytime half. Even in a long-light month like May, when the crew filmed there, the Kagami-no-ike pond sits inside a grove and goes dark as the afternoon tips. The shrine is on the southern edge of town, the park on the northeast shore, so a bus or a car joins them. See the shrine in the morning, come back into town for the Bakebake drama exhibit on the ground floor of Matsue City Hall (free, 9:00 to 16:30, open through March 31, 2027), then head for the lake before the light goes. Matsue Castle and the old Lafcadio Hearn residence draw the same visitors, but the Shimane tourism federation lists those as places the Hearns lived and walked rather than as filming locations.