A Gathering of Spirits: Japan's Ghost Story Tradition: From Folklore and Kabuki to Anime and Manga (14 page)

There are touches of humor among the thrills of
Bake
Neko
, but the episodes build quickly and relentlessly in tension and pacing as we try to find out what really happened before the cat spirit takes its revenge. If it’s possible, the story feels as if it’s exceeding the speed limit—the mounting sense of terror and danger is that palpable.

 CHAPTER 16: BEYOND THE ANIMAL KINGDOM

Buddhism, as is fairly well known, allows for the migration of souls from one body to another. This isn’t limited to the same species; a soul may, in this scheme of things, be reborn from an animal to a human or vice versa. This sets one of the
Rinne
stories of Rumiko Takahashi in motion.

 40. I want my princess

The ghost in this case is of a medieval Japanese warrior, decked out in the armor of the 1500s. You can tell he was killed in battle because he has arrows sticking in him. You can also tell he’s an ochimusha—a coward—because the arrows are sticking in his back. The logic is inescapable: the man was running away from the battle when he was killed.

But that doesn’t explain why he has lingered on earth for hundreds of years. There is a bit of unfinished business: he was engaged to be married to a girl he called Hime (princess), has been waiting to find her again, and now believes that he has done so. Consequently, he’s haunting a high school student named Kaori Himekawa who he’s convinced is his one-time fiancée. He keeps appearing to her in dreams, trying to get her to drink saké as part of a Shinto wedding ceremony.

To solve the problem, the spirit named Rinne consults an ungakyo—a mirror which shows a person’s past lives. By setting the ungakyo to 1573, the year the warrior was killed, it reveals that the student named Himekawa was at that time—a sea turtle. Checking out other members of the cast of characters in this story, Rinne examines the high school’s middle-aged, rather large nurse and finds that, on the year in question, she was a carp. Finally they locate the person who was the soldier’s beloved Hime, who is currently the boys’ physical education coach Suzuki. Not realizing he was once Hime, the coach asked the soldier, “Haven’t I met you somewhere?” The warrior’s response: “You have the wrong guy.” As the story says, after that, it didn’t take the ochimusha long to pass on; he’d put a lot of extra baggage behind him.

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A story dating from the 1600s has quite a mix of ingredients, including sacred trees and political corruption.

 41. Death by Tree

A famous fire in 1658 destroyed one-eighth of the city of Edo, the new capital of the nation which would be called Tokyo. One nobleman, the Daimyo Lord Date Tsunamune of Sendai, had built seven houses, but lost them all in the fire.

Lord Date Tsunamune wanted to rebuild his palaces with a splendor that would almost match the houses of the Shogun. (For obvious reasons, he couldn’t rebuild them as more splendid than the Shogun’s.) He appointed a nobleman to see to things, Harada Kai Naonori; he in turn met with a lumber broker named Kinokuniya Bunzaemon. The broker pointed out that, because of the fire, good lumber was hard to find; Harada replied that money was no object.

Kinokuniya was only concerned about one piece of wood: a single beam cut from a camphor tree for the ceiling beam of Lord Date Tsunamune’s main house. Most of the camphor trees, however, were old and regarded as sacred. The one tree that would best suit the purpose was in the forest of Nekoma-myojin, and was the responsibility of one of the Shogun’s retainers, named Fujieda Geki. He in turn met with four local village elders and, over dinner and drinks, determined that none of the four elders could read or write. This suited Fujieda Geki. All four of the elders told Fujieda Geki that the large camphor tree in question could not be touched, but they also agreed to put their seal to whatever document Fujieda Geki wrote. And Fujieda Geki was now assured that he could write the lumber permit any way he chose, regardless of the respect and veneration in which the local people held the camphor tree.

The next day, Kinokuniya sent a crew to the forest in question, four days travel away, with the vaguely worded permit signed by the seal of all four elders. The local caretaker questioned the four elders, who thought they had exempted the large camphor from being cut, although the permit didn’t read that way. When he realized what had happened, Hamada Tsushima, the caretaker of the camphor tree, committed suicide, stating before he did that his spirit would enter the camphor tree, so that he might have revenge on the corrupt Kinokuniya.

Eventually the crew brought down the camphor tree, but it was difficult: the men could not move the felled tree at all, and, whenever they came close to it, the branches would lash out at their faces and bodies. The fallen tree’s branches swung so quickly and powerfully that members of the crew suffered broken limbs, and some were crushed nearly to death.

In the middle of all this, with word spreading on the inability to take lumber from the famous camphor tree, a messenger from the Daimyo arrived, ordering the lumber crew to leave the camphor tree alone and return home; the four elders, on the other hand, were summoned to court so that they might commit suicide to atone for their foolishness.

As for the corrupt contractor Kinokuniya, he stated that he was sick and hid in his rooms. A servant was sent to look in on him, and a barber came to see him; shortly thereafter, Kinokuniya was found dead. The head of the crew sent to harvest the camphor tree, a man named Chogoro, did penance by building a new shrine for the fallen camphor tree and hiring a new caretaker to replace Hamada Tsushima, who had committed suicide. At last report, the fallen camphor tree and its new shrine are still there.

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Sometimes, a ghost can turn into something completely non-animal.

 42. Returning as a “Bug”

According to a legend from the
Konjaku
, an epidemic struck Japan in the ninth century C.E. Everyone, from the emperor down to the common people, developed a terrible hacking cough. However, nobody knew just what it was, and everyone feared that it could turn into something lethal.

One evening, a cook was on his way home from work; he cooked for a nobleman but did not live with him and his staff. Along the way, he met a tall and frightening nobleman, dressed in a red cloak and formal headdress. He didn’t know the dire figure, but knew enough to kneel and bow before him.

The noble spoke: “I used to be Ban no Yoshio, a counselor who committed a serious crime against His Majesty, lost his post and died in exile.
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In death I became a spirit of pestilence. But I still feel that I owe much to my country for the favors that I enjoyed while I was at court. I have something important to tell you.

“Heaven had decided that there would be a dire sickness this year that would kill all who contracted it. I petitioned to have the fatal epidemic become a coughing fit instead. Please let people know that they need not be afraid.” After he had spoken, the noble spirit vanished.

The cook did as he was asked, telling people about Ban no Yoshio and the nature of the sickness then sweeping through Japan. People were relieved that the illness was not serious, although it seemed strange that Ban no Yoshio, who certainly could have appeared to anyone, spoke to a cook.

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Another memorable case chronicled in the
Konjaku
tells a cautionary tale of a hermit monk who allowed the beauties of an empress to so possess him that, at death, he immediately left human form.

 43. A Lustful Demon

This story started with the serious illness one summer of the beautiful Somedono Empress.
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Doctors and monks tried to heal her but failed. Finally, the emperor heard of a powerful hermit monk who lived in the Katsuragi Mountains of Yamato Province.
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The emperor and his father-in-law summoned the monk, who no sooner started praying for the empress than one of the empress’ ladies-in-waiting began yelping, screaming, and running through the house. Finally she was cornered, and a fox crawled out of the lady’s kimono. Once the fox was captured, the empress regained her health.

A few days later, while the hermit was still at the home of the emperor, he caught a glimpse of the empress in a light summer kimono. With this brief glimpse of feminine beauty, the hermit monk fell hopelessly in love with the empress. He rushed to embrace her, but the ladies-in-waiting sounded the alarm, and the hermit was thrown into prison. In his cell he would pray to die, be reborn as a demon, and have sex with the empress in that demonic form. The emperor banished the hermit back to his home in Yamato province, where, still consumed with desire for the empress, he starved himself for more than ten days. When he died, he changed in that instant into a demon: a monster standing eight feet tall, with black skin, eyes like brass bowls, tusks like a boar, and a bald head. He wore only a loincloth.

This was how he appeared to the empress, as he had desired. As her ladies-in-waiting fled in terror, the empress, whose mind was turned by the demon, welcomed him into her bed. This repeated itself daily, with the demon appearing in broad daylight to be the empress’ lover, leaving only around sundown.

The emperor called in other holy men to subdue the demon, and, for a time, it did not appear. However, one day, when it had been days since the demon had appeared, he returned as the entire court watched. He went to the empress’s bed chamber; she followed him as if the rest of the court wasn’t there; then they came out again and, as the
Kojaku
put it, “brazenly performed an unspeakable act.”
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The moral of this story originally was that noble ladies should safeguard their virtue and not allow themselves to be approached by hermit monks. For this book, however, the point is that the spirit is very flexible after death, and one might assume any of an infinite number of shapes, not necessarily limited to humans or even animals. There are, as we shall see, even good ghosts.

 CHAPTER 17: HOUSEHOLD GHOSTS: ZASHIKI

While some spirits—human or animal—can be malicious, others are nice and even helpful. Ghosts stay in the human world not just in order to inflict rough justice as payment for bad karma. A few ghosts even bring good luck; the trick is to recognize them as such.

 44. “Brother, poor brother”

The Enoki family (a widower father and his two sons) are featured in Marimo Ragawa’s manga
Akachan
to
Boku
(Baby
and
Me)
. In one episode, they spend a summer weekend at an old inn complete with its own
onsen
(hot springs). The little old lady who runs the inn at first calls older son Takuya “Tadaomi”; we find out later it’s because he resembles an ill-fated boy by that name who died at a young age of tuberculosis. Tadaomi’s little sister Kikuko was killed shortly thereafter when a building collapsed.

Kikuko, however, has hung around the
onsen
in spirit, and at first she’s only visible to Takuya, who caught a cold and developed a fever, and his toddler brother Minoru. We’ll see a little later that (in the pop culture, anyway) ghosts can be perceived while one is undergoing surgery, suffering delirium, or otherwise detached from this world. Minoru’s case reflects the traditional Japanese belief that, between birth and age seven, a child lives partly in this world and partly in the spirit-world where the child’s soul dwelt before it was born on Earth. By age seven, the child is accepted as fully in and of this world.
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This explains not only the very unusual things little children sometimes say and do—such as saying that they remember things that happened before they were born—but also its parallel belief that elderly people over the age of seventy begin losing their souls back to the spirit realm in preparation for death, as a way of accounting for some forms of senile dementia.

Kikuko’s spirit is unsettling to Takuya because Kikuko herself was unsettled in life. When her brother developed tuberculosis, he knew that it was contagious and that he needed to be isolated, so Tadaomi, who previously had been kind to Kikuko, became angry and short with her, hoping that she would grow angry and leave him alone, and avoid catching the disease; in doing this, he was still being the loving big brother by looking out for her, thinking that she was still too young to understand what was happening. All this did, however, was confuse the child, who ended up both hating and loving her big brother and couldn’t reconcile the two sets of feelings. In the end, Minoru’s unfailing love for his ill big brother causes Kikuko to remember her love for her brother despite his abuse. She apologizes to Takuya, believing him to be Tadaomi; he accepts her apology by patting her on the head. In the final scene, the fever breaks, the Enoki family checks out of the inn, and Minoru happily waves goodbye to the ghost of Kikuko, presumably before she Becomes One with the Cosmos and is reunited with her beloved big brother. However, she may have another part to play, especially if she hangs around the inn as a zashiki.

The story can be read to mean that the main reason that Kikuko was still haunting the inn was because she did not have a
yasashii
(kind, compassionate) spirit. When she appeared to Takuya, she tells him, “Brother, poor brother, it’s so sad; you’re going to die soon.” The look on her face, however, is anything but sad. Still remembering his mean behavior toward her, she looks very happy delivering the news of his imminent death. As the old lady tells Takuya, “Kikuko was still angry with her brother when she died.” But if she were
only
angry, then Tadaomi’s death would have been sufficient. The conflict had to be resolved for her to find peace, and, Japanese pop culture being what it is, the conflict was resolved in favor of love, kindness, and compassion.

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Kikuko would have been a good candidate to become a zashiki. Legends of zashiki warashi (the name literally means “room child”) vary from place to place, but, despite its human appearance, it isn’t a particular person’s ghost. Rather, it’s a good luck spirit who appears and behaves in a child-like manner. Generally speaking, the zashiki warashi blesses whatever house it occupies, and a house which loses this spirit falls on hard times. There are minor ghostly happenings that come along with the good luck—music coming from empty rooms, footprints appear in ashes—and usually only children or family members can see the spirit. It must be acknowledged and respected, although too much human attention can drive it away.

It’s worth noting that the ghostly little girl was still at the inn when the boys and their father left. Since zashiki warashi can be either boys or girls, it’s possible that this ghost has stayed around to bring luck to a family that needed it.

 45. One Hundred Hiccups

One story in the Boy Love manga known in Japan as
Ghost!
and in English translation as
Eerie
Queerie
records a zashiki encounter. The cast members of this manga by Shuri Shiozu attend an exclusive boys-only high school; in one episode the students go to a rural hotel for a four-day field trip. The old landlady
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at the equally old inn at first denies that the inn is haunted; the students, however, have already heard rumors that severed feet wander the halls at night, or that they might encounter a woman in a bloody kimono. A few oddities do occur, but they’re far tamer and seem like traditional poltergeist tricks: pebbles fall from the ceiling, and at dawn all the pillows in the room where the boys sleep have stacked themselves into a pyramid. Mitsuo also gets a severe case of hiccups, and hears a voice telling him that he will die if he hiccups one hundred times without stopping.

The supernatural activity is actually by a zashiki warashi, whose presence brings good luck to the inn—if only by reputation. Landlady Okiku admits that simply the rumor of a zashiki at the inn, which has had to compete with more modern tourist hotels, has brought more business, if only from curiosity-seekers. It’s been a balancing-act, however. The zashiki would flee the inn with too much attention or the wrong kind; Okiku took it on herself to scout out playmates for the zashiki, which explains Mitsuo’s non-lethal case of hiccups.

The reader is told that this particular legend survives in the Tohoku region of Japan, the northernmost prefectures on the main island of Honshu.
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 46. “Who are you?”

An adult manga story by an artist who uses the pen-name “Senno Knife” is titled “Zashiki Bokko.” In this case, the spirit is a female, who watches over and blesses a small mountain inn next to an
onsen
. The word “bokko” is an archaic reference to a young woman. This particular spirit, who goes by the name “Koyuki” (child of snow) is interested in Masao, the youngest son of the family that owns the inn; he’s been away at college for four years, and the family is afraid he’ll follow the path of his brothers. “Once you go to the city,” they tell him, “you’ll never want to come back here.”

Unknown to his family, he has an incentive to come back: Koyuki, who he met in a cave in the hot springs. He discovered her there one day, attractive and nude, and she told him, “When the time is right, I’ll do it with you.” The night he returns from college, just as Masao decides to look for Koyuki, she comes to his room and takes him down to the onsen cave. They strip and have sex. Masao fleetingly wonders, “Koyuki, who are you?” before realizing “It doesn’t matter who you are, if you could always be by my side.” In the end, Masao decides to stay at the inn. We can certainly understand the incentive.

 47. For a potato chip

In
Jigoku
Sensei
Nube
, a manga with artwork by Takeshi Okano and story by Sho Makura, fifth grade teacher and part-time exorcist Meisuke Nueno begins one episode on a Sunday morning; with no school and bored to death, he heads for a pachinko parlor where he uses his exorcist abilities to manipulate the game and clean up, winning a lot of prizes (mostly alcoholic). On the way home, though, he gets hit by a falling tool from a telephone lineman. His luck swings from bad back to good when he sees, over near a garbage dump, a very little girl, looking like a doll in traditional kimono. He immediately recognizes her as a zashiki warashi and offers her a potato chip, which she happily accepts. Nueno chats happily with the spirit, which none of the passers-by can see.

The next morning, the zashiki warashi is waiting in Nueno’s classroom, sitting on the teacher’s desk. He announces a pop quiz, and all of the students get perfect scores. He puts them through gym class, and even the smallest and weakest students do perfectly. It seems the zashiki warashi is still trying to help. The last straw comes when Ritsuko Takahashi, a very pretty teacher, walks up and asks Nueno out on a date.

Nueno takes the zashiki warashi up onto the roof of the school, feeding it chips, and then has to break it to her: she made the entire class happy inside of ten minutes, but people have to seek out their happiness, and can’t have it given to them. In short, he says, they don’t need her. He knows he’s hurt her feelings, but all he can do is watch as she runs off of the roof.

Sometime later, as school is letting out, a student dashes out into traffic in front of an oncoming truck. He would surely have been hit and killed, if not for the zashiki warashi; she caused a five-car pile-up, but saved the student. Nueno sees the zashiki warashi, asks if it’s exhausted from saving the student’s life, and offers some of his own psychic energy to her. This is all it takes to make her happy again. She disappears. Nueno is surprised when snowflakes start falling; warm snowflakes. He looks down the road and sees the zashiki warashi (having taken one last chip) happily running down the road, presumably looking for someone else to help.

 48. Gift Exchange

Finally, we see a zashiki warashi (actually more of a zashiki bokko) in the CLAMP manga and anime
xxxHolic
, created for young adults (a seinen manga) and published from 2003 to February 2011, making it one of CLAMP’s longest-running titles. It’s the tale of Kimihiro Watanuki
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, a high school student whose highly developed psychic abilities (a family legacy) enable him to see spirits. This poses a problem; he’s basically a good guy, and can’t help trying to aid whatever spirit he finds; most of the time, though, he considers his gift a nuisance. He stumbles across the curiosity shop run by a self-described witch named Yuko Ichihara; she offers to remove his ability to see spirits—for a price. Since he can’t meet the price, he agrees to work at the shop. The catch, of course, is that he’s going to keep seeing spirits until he earns enough to pay Yuko’s fee (she never explains until the end how much it is or how far along Watanuki is to earning the right amount; this makes her kind of a spiritual loan-shark).

This particular ghostly encounter (the manga version) starts late on the night of February 13. Even after working during the day for Yuko, she orders him to make chocolate pudding cakes for herself and her two childlike assistants. As Watanuki rather loudly reminds Yuko, she didn’t have any ingredients for a chocolate pudding cake, so he had to go out shopping first—in cold and rainy weather—before he could start cooking. By the time he’s finished, it’s midnight, the start of Valentine’s Day. Yuko sends the leftovers to clients in another dimension, but is happily frank in admitting that she sent the gift on Valentine’s Day so that her clients would feel the need to reciprocate on White Day.
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Watanuki is still bitter about the whole thing, since the Valentine tradition in Japan has girls cooking chocolates to give to boys they like. He feels better, however, when he realizes that he can take the last leftover cake and give it to the cute but mysterious Himawari, on whom he’s had a severe crush ever since he first saw her.

But things do not go according to plan. First, Himawari isn’t in school on Valentine’s Day, having caught a cold. Moreover, the pudding cake, and even the accompanying cup of hot chocolate, are devoured instead by Domeki, star athlete and apparent rival with Watanuki for Himawari’s attention. To make matters worse, on this day when girls are supposed to give chocolates to guys, Watanuki hadn’t received any chocolate at all; Domeki, meanwhile, has to carry his gifts home in a shopping bag. Their argument is interrupted by a young girl, who looks to be about twelve years old, wearing a parka and hood over her dress. She speaks as if she had meant to give a chocolate gift to a special person, but has apparently misplaced it. Suddenly, however, she reaches through Domeki’s coat and into his stomach, pulling the pudding cake out, whole again.

Domeki, who is descended from a line of Shinto priests but hasn’t had much experience with spirits, faints dead away. Watanuki can only watch as the girl, looking ready to burst into tears, rises up off the street and floats away. Just at this moment, Yuko happens by; she declares that the girl didn’t just take Domeki’s snack but also his soul. Watanuki, realizing that it was his fault Domeki got involved, wants to put things right even if he doesn’t much like Domeki. Yuko whistles up her Mokona,
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who arrives at once flying a bird as big as an elephant. Yuko tells Watanuki to use the bird to find the girl; Domeki’s soul must be restored to him by sundown.