YMMV / Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales

• Awesome Music: Both the opening ("Heat Island") and ending ("Memory of Spring") themes are awesome, and the latter also manages to be heart-rendingly beautiful.
• Complete Monster:
  • Yotsuya Kaidan arc: Tamiya Iemon, while initially more sympathetic than his theatre counterpart, quickly becomes just as evil. When the father of his fiancée Oiwa breaks off their marriage due to his Ronin status, Iemon murders the man in order to have Oiwa return to him and pretends to seek vengeance. After the Time Skip, Iemon tortures a servant for stealing his medicine to save his ailing father and kidnaps him. After the birth of Oiwa's child, Iemon loses all affection for her and agrees to marry the woman who poisoned and disfigured her solely for her wealth. Iemon then instructs one of his friends to rape Oiwa in order to get her thrown out for infidelity, and to murder her if she fights back. After the man informs Oiwa of the scheme, Oiwa is so mortified she kills herself, to which Iemon has no remorse. Iemon then murders his kidnapped servant even after he offers to not spill the truth in exchange for the medicine, in order to frame him as Oiwa's illicit lover, and has his infant son killed with them. When Oiwa returns as a ghost and kills his new family, Iemon shows no grief.
  • Bakeneko Mononoke Pilot Arc: Lord Yoshiyuki is the pathetic, geriatric patriarch of the Saika family, and the cause of the Bakeneko's existence. Decades ago, Yoshiyuki kidnapped a young woman named Tamaki, imprisoning her in a tiny cage and regularly raping her with his family's knowledge for decades, which drove her to attempt suicide by starvation. After his son Yoshikuni rapes Tamaki out of curiosity, Yoshiyuki is driven into a rage for her "seducing" his son and beats her to death in front of her beloved pet cat, causing it to be twisted into the Bakeneko as a result of grief. In the present, Yoshiyuki lies about the truth as the Bakeneko threatens the lives of others, claiming to have treated Tamaki in a loving fashion before the Bakeneko reveals the truth.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Many viewers post-Mononoke don't watch it on its own merits, but mainly to see the Bakeneko arc.
• Magnificent Bastard: The Medicine Peddler makes his debut here in the Bakeneko segment, but doesn't show his full cards in ruthlessness yet. See here for more details.
• Moral Event Horizon: The ireedemable sins of some characters cause revenge from the great beyond to happen.
  • The Yotsuya Kaidan story has Iemon, who started his descent into villainy by murdering Oiwa's father for getting in the way of his love for her, and tortured a man to death for trying to steal a life-saving medicine. And he also tried to get rid of Oiwa by bribing his retainer to rape her (the retainer, at least, does not go through with it and tells her everything). Oume and her family are no better, disfiguring Oiwa horribly with orally administered poison in order to make Iemon dump her, just so she could have him for herself.
  • The Bakeneko story has the whole aristocratic family, with the elderly patriarch kidnapping, abusing and raping Tamaki for his own sexual amusement in his younger days. Later said patriarch's eldest son attempted to have his way with her, and when the patriarch caught them together, he mistook the situation as Tamaki seducing his son and beat her to death while his eldest son just watched. The rest of the family, like Sato, were implied to have been involved with Tamaki's abuse as well. Only Kayo and Odajima (one of the family maids and the samurai retainer) had nothing to do with all that, and fittingly they were the only ones who made it out alive though badly shaken up and horrified by what they saw.
• Shocking Moments: The entire Bakeneko arc is this. The fact that it contains gorgeous stylized artwork as a complete contrast to the first two arcs had something to do with it.