A Gathering of Spirits: Japan's Ghost Story Tradition: From Folklore and Kabuki to Anime and Manga (15 page)

Watanuki quickly sees the girl, silhouetted against the rising moon. No sooner does he get close to her than he’s attacked by five cherubs in trench coats, riding snowboards through the sky. They threaten Watanuki because “You made her cry!” Watanuki falls off of the giant bird, but is rescued by the girl spirit. She rescued Watanuki because she meant to give him the pudding cake; she didn’t seem to realize that she’d taken Domeki’s soul out of him when she took the cake. With that, she floats away, as do the cherubs, who threaten Watanuki one last time to never make her cry.

Yuko explains that the girl was a zashiki, while the cherubs were karasutengu—crow spirits who usually hide in the mountains away from the pernicious influence of humans. However, the zashiki was a girl, doing what Japanese girls did on February 14: she gave a gift of chocolate to a boy she found to be admirable: Watanuki. This softened the blow somewhat for Watanuki; after all, not only had he baked it in the first place, but he had to give it back to Domeki to restore his soul. Even when Himawari returns to school after her bout with the cold, things don’t get better: she gives a box of store-bought chocolate to Watanuki, and an identical box to Domeki. Yuko tried to console him by reminding him that he’d also gotten chocolate from the zasshiki, even though he’d had to give it back to Domeki. (When this manga episode was animated for television, the date was changed from Valentine’s Day to the Obon festival, which made the zashiki seem confused rather than simply naïve.)

The zasshiki appears again in the anime version on March 14, dressed in kimono, and this time Watanuki’s prepared, giving the spirit a set of hairpins for White Day (in the manga Watanuki finds her, months late, in a strange world, where he may unwittingly be serving Yuko as bait.) Interestingly, her crush on Kimihiro is understood to be natural, even in the spirit world.

 CHAPTER 18: SPIRITS, SICKNESS AND SURGERY

We’ve already had examples of hauntings as part of sicknesses, in or out of hospitals, places where souls become detached from their bodies on a regular basis. This is a concept built into the Japanese kanji used to describe the phenomenon. The word ikiryo means “the spirit leaving the body.”
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The reasons for the move, however, can vary. Lady Rokujo had an out-of-body experience when her lover Prince Genji got interested in another woman. Here are a few more examples; the first is an elaborate ghost story featuring one of the classic characters of the God of Manga.

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Black
Jack:
Clinical
Chart
6
:
Night
Time
Tale
in
the
Snow
“Lovelorn
Princess”

 49. Can a surgeon heal what’s wrong with a ghost?

In my travels I’ve witnessed both life and death. On rare occasions I’ve also encountered incidents for which I have no explanation; events that seemed to defy reason. As a doctor I place my faith in knowledge, which both time and science have proven to be true. When I am faced with things that scientific knowledge can’t explain, I find myself filled with wonder and awe. I am reminded that man’s knowledge is still far from perfect, and believe all men of science need such reminders.

So begins the sixth OAV featuring one of Dr. Osamu Tezuka’s most popular characters: the super-surgeon known as Black Jack. He receives a commission one day by mail to heal the wife of Saburo Taneda, who lives in a small village in the mountains. The request—which had been delayed in the mail for two years—was accompanied by over 3.7 million yen in cash as a retainer.

When Black Jack and his child assistant Pinoko arrive in the mountains during a blizzard, they seek shelter in a Buddhist temple—and are immediately whisked back to feudal times. Black Jack now must heal a princess whose malady is symbolized by an elaborate serpent tattoo that circles her body. He also gets caught up in a romantic extended triangle: a princess is in love with one of her retainers, a soldier whose lower social position prevents them from being together. At the same time, the princess is also sought after by Mr. Rokushouji, a wealthy Imperial bureaucrat who abandoned his first wife to pursue the young and beautiful princess. The first wife, Lady Kaoru, has gone to the temple, shaved her head, and become a Buddhist nun, but has not forgiven her husband for abandoning her; she sets her own plot in motion with the assistance of Abumaru, a young man who is loyal to her. Things do not end well: ultimately, the princess, her beloved retainer, the bureaucrat, the Buddhist nun, and the nun’s devoted young man are all dead.

This ghostly encounter, which by unfolding around Black Jack seems to echo the “Earless Hoichi” episode of
Kwaidan
, may seem like a digression from the doctor’s real business. However, once the older drama has played out, Black Jack finds himself back in the present day. He locates the ailing but still living Mrs. Taneda, whose husband was killed in a construction accident shortly after he sent the money to Black Jack two years earlier. Her condition can be cured, but only in a hospital with proper surgical facilities. As they leave, Black Jack meets Mrs. Taneda’s neighbors, a woman and her teenaged son—who bear a strong resemblance to the Lady Kaoru and her young devotee Abumaru, just as Mrs. Taneda resembles the princess and her husband resembled the soldier. And what of Mr. Rokushouji, the wealthy bureaucrat whose cold abandonment of his wife helped set the feudal tragedy in motion? At the beginning of the anime, Black Jack has to ask directions to the village from a trucker hauling logs. We never see the trucker, but, by going back to the beginning and replaying this scene, we realize that he is speaking in the voice of Mr. Rokushouji.

In essence, the older tragedy had to play itself out, presumably again and again, with the ghosts of those involved until things could be resolved properly through the intervention of someone like Black Jack. Unlike Hoichi, Black Jack was not a mere spectator to a ghostly pageant; the ghosts showed him what they had done to cause such enduring bad karma, which he had to fix, just as he surgically healed Mrs. Taneda. The whole story is summed up—although the viewer may not realize it at first—by Lady Kaoru; when Black Jack apologizes to her (the Buddhist nun who ran the temple where Black Jack took shelter) for his unexpected visit, she simply says, “All of us become lost in our travels from time to time.” Some, it seems, become lost because of their actions, and some become lost in order to help others find their way home.

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Black Jack also ran into another patient who wasn’t exactly human.

 50. On a snowy night

The story takes place on the night of a raging blizzard. Black Jack is home alone when there’s a knock at the door of his isolated house. He answers; nobody is outside. He shuts the door, and finds two people suddenly in his house: a man and a woman, in modern dress. The woman asks Black Jack to operate on their mother. “I’m not a regular doctor,” he tells them, and demands a fee of ¥30 million. No sooner does he ask than the money is on the table, in cash. The young people are talking to the doctor’s examination table as if their mother is on it; Black Jack can’t see anyone there.

He goes through the motions of trying to operate on someone who he can’t see, while his visitors tell him he’s doing a brilliant job. Finally he declares that he’s finished and the mother will be fine. The woman finally tells Black Jack about the patient: name, Aya Matsumoto, age 45, and that the two are her children; their names are Eiji and Maniko. Mother was to take a tour of the northern island of Hokkaido, until her passenger jet was struck by a missile from a nearby military base; it crashed to earth, setting off a fire in the nearby village’s
shitamachi
.
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It’s only after Black Jack defends his invisible patient to some local hunters and police that the voices of Eiji and Maniko return. They invite Black Jack to accompany their mother on a journey much farther than Hokkaido; when he refuses, the millions of yen blow out the door and into the snowy night.

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We’ve already seen how, in
Akachan
to
Boku
, a character can open the door to the spirit world when fever or other illness weakens the connection to the real world. Another example appears in
xxxHolic
, the manga by CLAMP and its animated version. On a hot summer night Yuko arranges for four people to tell ghost stories; it was supposed to be a
hyaku
monogatari
session, but cut down to four stories told by each of the four participants—sixteen stories instead of the full hundred. However, the spirits are so active that the partiers don’t even make it to the fourth story. Nobuhiro Watanuki gets to tell only one story, and, in the manga, his turns out to be elegantly creepy:
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 51. Just Two Students Chatting

One time in grade school, Watanuki was resting on a bed in the nurse’s office; he had a bad headache and “was really out of it.” As he lay in bed, alone in the office, he heard a voice ask, “Hey, mister, are you all right?” The voice came from a child who was outside the window, looking in. Watanuki said that he just had a headache, and they spoke for a while. Watanuki had no idea who the boy was, but it was a large school and it was easy to lose track of people unless you see them all the time. After a while, the child waved, said “Take care of yourself,” and was no longer standing at the window.

It wasn’t until he was feeling better that Watanuki realized something: the nurse’s office was on the third floor of the school. There was no balcony, no fire escape, no ledge, no tree—nowhere someone could stand and look in through that window and have a conversation.

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Ghosts have also been known to appear in medical anime/manga in another circumstance: when a character is undergoing surgery due to a life-threatening condition. While they are under anesthetic, a character is seen as on the border between the worlds of the living and the dead, especially if that character has almost given up the will to live.

Two examples out of many:

Kodocha
is an abbreviation of the phrase
Kodomo
no
Omocha
(Children’s
Toys)
.
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This girls’ manga by Miho Obana ran in
Ribon
magazine from 1994 to 1998 and was later animated into a popular series. The story centers on child actress and idol Sana Kurata and her attempts to have a “normal” life (as normal as possible, anyway, between hosting her own TV series, her mother being a reclusive novelist, and her mother’s assistant being a transvestite). She has been seeing Akito, a classmate who’s something of a loner, in no small part because he’s been made to feel guilty because his mother died giving birth to him.

At one point in the manga, Akito is knifed in the woods by a disturbed student named Kazuyuki; by the time they get back to civilization, Akito has lost a lot of blood. He has also nearly lost the will to live, but during the surgery he’s encouraged to keep fighting by the spirit of his mother. Even though he never met her, he recognizes her as such.

Actually, we see that he’s almost met her. Kazuyuki had become obsessed with Akito’s popularity, and had hoped to receive at least some of that reflected popularity by arranging for the two of them to commit the mutual suicide known as shinjuu. When Akito refuses, Kazuyuki stabs Akito in the arm; by the time they get back to civilization, Akito is dying from his wound. Yet, several times when the boys are in the woods, the manga reader sees the ghostly figure of a woman among the trees. She isn’t identified, but, by the time of Akito’s surgical crisis, we realize that the ghostly woman is his mother, who died in childbirth. She tells her son to “live, for both of us.” We last see her in the operating room, floating up near the ceiling light.

Similarly, the 1998 weekly anime series
Princess
Nine
revolves around Ryo Hayakawa, daughter of a once-famous Japanese baseball player and nucleus of the first girl’s high school baseball team in Japan. Her father died when she was five years old, but when Ryo requires surgery after rescuing two young children in a flood, under anesthetic her spirit meets her father’s spirit. His advice to Ryo is essentially the same as that given to Akito by his mother: keep on trying, believe in tomorrow and in yourself.

It’s a message that may seem to ring hollow to some older, more experienced Japanese readers, and especially after the 2011 earthquake and attendant tsunami, but Sana and Akito and Ryo and most of the stars of both stories are not older. They are still of an age where belief is possible, where a better tomorrow is still attainable—the fundamental message of most of the popular culture in Japan.

 CHAPTER 19: AT THE MOVIES: SOME CLASSIC POSTWAR JAPANESE GHOST FILMS

The first two postwar decades of Japanese movies are hardly known in the west, except perhaps for the tales of Gojira (a/k/a Godzilla) and its other monster buddies such as Mothra and Rodan. But Japanese studios were able to get back on their feet for a number of reasons, and the popularity of ghost stories is one of those reasons. Three movies made between 1950 and 1965 got to America with impressive “art house” credentials, as well as scares, intact. They’re known to serious students of film history as well as those who enjoy a good thrill.

The first of these three movies is barely a ghost story, but it certainly qualifies; its reputation as one of Japan’s classic movies tends to overshadow the supernatural action.

Rashomon
was filmed in 1950 and directed by Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998), Japan’s best-known postwar director. The reason he was best-known is simple: he was a genius whose style evolved according to developments in film technology. Born into a family of samurai ancestors, Kurosawa’s father was athletics director at a junior high school. He was also an advocate of the new technology of silent movies, and Akira’s older brother Heigo later became a
benshi
, a narrator of silent films that drew on Japan’s long storytelling tradition. Akira became an apprentice in 1936 at what would later become Toho Studios.

His influences were broad but also very western, including Shakespeare (
Throne
of
Blood
was Kurosawa’s version of
Macbeth
) and Russian literature, but these were often mixed with Japanese influences such as kabuki theatrical conventions. Similarly, Kurosawa’s movies influenced filmmakers around the world. The classic samurai drama
Yojimbo
was supposedly based on the books of hardboiled American mystery writer Dashiell Hammett, but was later remade by Italian director Sergio Leone as the first of the so-called “spaghetti Westerns,”
A
Fistful
of
Dollars
.
The
Seven
Samurai
, supposedly influenced by director John Ford, was remade as the American cowboy classic
The
Magnificent
Seven
.

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 52. Witness from Beyond

Rashomon
was based on a pair of short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927). Akutagawa’s story “Rashomon” serves as bookends for the movie, while the bulk of the film is based on his “In the Grove.” In ancient times a young, well-to-do couple traveling through the forest is surprised by a bandit. The husband ends up bound and stabbed to death, the wife ends up raped. The bandit and the wife tell violently different versions of what happened (the bandit said the husband fought like a tiger, while the wife ran away; the wife said the bandit ravaged her, while the husband begged her with his eyes to kill him and then kill herself, which she didn’t have the strength to do), and the court hears from a medium who becomes possessed by the ghost of the husband and adds his very different version of events (the bandit raped the wife, who then encouraged the robber to kill the husband; he couldn’t do it, especially after the wife ran off; when the robber cut the husband’s ropes and ran off, the husband committed suicide).
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The medium is a
kuchiyose
(literally, “lending a mouth”); in this case, giving a voice to the spirit of the dead man. The story’s unique structure offers up different characters telling different versions of the same story, leaving the reader (or movie audience) to try to sort out the truth.

Incidentally, a minor character in
Rashomon
, known only as the Policeman, was played by a young actor named Daisuke Kato, who the year before had also appeared in a film version of Japan’s archetypal Kabuki ghost play,
Yotsuya
Kaidan
. (See chapter 11)

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Three years after
Rashomon
, director Kenji Mizoguchi offered up another classic Japanese ghost story; actually, a pair of stories.
Ugetsu
monogatari
(1953) began life in 1776 as a collection of ghost stories with accompanying woodblock prints and commentaries. Written by Ueda Akinari, the title can be translated “Stories Under a Moon in the Rain.” Of the nine stories in the collection, director Mizoguchi used two (plus part of a third) in his film of the same name.

The nine original stories actually are quite different from the scare-inducing stories written down by Lafcadio Hearn or the gruesome shock films of today. Ueda’s ghost stories are meant to be examples of virtue and moral uplift—even if a couple of the examples are rather extreme. The stories are sometimes pleasant, as in “I Dreamed of a Carp,” in which a Buddhist monk from the Heian Era, who was so committed to not killing that he paid fishermen to throw back their catch, has a fever dream in which he lives the life of a carp. “Chrysanthemum Tryst” shows brotherly love to an extreme, as two men—one a poor scholar and the other a warrior nursed back to health by the scholar—swear friendship and vow to meet again at that year’s Chrysanthemum Festival (on the ninth day of the ninth month), after the warrior goes home to help his family. The warrior doesn’t return until the night of the Chrysanthemum Festival; in fact, only his ghost returns to the scholar. The soldier was imprisoned when he returned home and could only keep his promise by committing suicide, so that at least his spirit could visit his friend.

At the other end of the scale is “The Blue Hood.” This story starts with the obsessive love of an abbot for one of his young students. When the boy dies, the abbot’s obsession turns to the most literal way to possess the young student: cannibalism. A more devout priest is able to exorcize the evil spirit of the obsessed abbot.

Mizoguchi’s film uses two stories from the
Ugetsu
Monogatari
about two married couples, who end up with very different destinies.

 53. Welcome Home

In “The House Amid the Thickets,” we meet the farmer Katsushiro and his wife Miyagi, trying to make a living on their farm in Shimosa province, on Japan’s Pacific coast. Convinced that he can make more money as a silk merchant hundreds of miles away in Kyoto, Katsushiro leaves home one spring day, promising his wife Miyagi that he’ll be home by autumn. In fact, he doesn’t return for seven years, after bandits steal the money he made in Kyoto and war breaks out in Shimosa. When he finally gets home, Miyagi joyfully greets him. When he wakes up the next morning, he realizes the truth: his wife had died shortly after he set off seven years earlier, and he had spent the night talking with her spirit.

 54. Domestic Disturbance

In contrast is “The Lust of the White Serpent.” Toyoo, the son of a well-off fisherman, abandons his fiancée and chases after the rich widow Manago. When he agrees to marry her, Manago presents him with a sword which turns out to have been stolen. When the police try to arrest Manago, she disappears with a flash of lightning. Despite this indication that Manago was a demon in human form, she reappears to Toyoo later and asks forgiveness—and he’s foolish enough to agree. When an elderly priest exposes Manago as a white serpent demon, Toyoo flees again to his original fiancée. One night, Manago possesses Toyoo’s new wife; the serpent is exorcised, but the wife dies.

These two stories from Ueda’s anthology were, in a sense, the same story: a cautionary tale from the 18
^th
century that resonated with postwar Japan.
Ugetsu
served, with its stylized ghost stories, to remind its audience to stay close to home, to be faithful to the traditions that kept Japan alive for centuries. Perhaps Mizoguchi already knew the upheavals the rest of the twentieth century would bring.

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One of the oldest English books of Japanese lore focused on ghost stories: Lafcadio Hearn’s
Kwaidan
(published in 1904, the year of his death), which also became one of Japan’s best-known ghost movies when directed by Masaki Kobayashi, screenplay by Yoko Mizuki (1964).

This film contains four distinct, separate stories. In “Black Hair”, a poor samurai, who divorces his true love to marry for money, finds the marriage disastrous and returns to his old wife, only to discover (to put it mildly) something eerie about her. In “The Woman in the Snow” a woodcutter, stranded in a snowstorm, meets an icy spirit in the form of a woman; she spares his life on the condition that he never tell anyone about her. A decade later, in a moment of weakness he forgets his promise. The third story, “Hoichi the Earless”, focuses on a blind musician living in a monastery, who sings so well that a ghostly imperial court commands him to perform the epic ballad of their death battle for them. The ghosts of the Heike royalty are draining away his life, and the monks set out to protect him by writing holy scriptures over his body to make him invisible to the ghosts. But, as the title suggests, they’ve forgotten something… Although he pays a large price, in the end Hoichi agrees to play “for the rest of my life so that these sorrowful spirits may rest in peace.”

 55. Swallowing a Soul

Finally, in “In a Cup of Tea”, a writer introduces a fragment of an old story dating from the 17
^th
century. It tells of a man who keep seeing a face reflected in his cup of tea; a face that’s not his own. It’s the face of a swordsman who threatens to come back and avenge the wrongs done him. However, nobody else can see the ghostly swordsman or his attendants. As for the short-story writer, he has left the tale deliberately unfinished, knowing that the reader’s imagination, dealing with the matter of “swallowing a soul” by drinking the reflection in a cup of tea, would be more chilling than anything the writer could make up. The visiting publisher is interrupted by a terrified scream from the writer’s servant. She, and then the publisher, run off after seeing the image of the writer reflected in the teapot.

In a sense, this fourth segment is also an inspiration for
Ringu
. Buildings can obviously be haunted, but it’s sometimes more horrifying when ghosts are found in common household objects, such as a teacup—or a television set.

Incidentally, there’s an anime connection to
Kwaidan
. The blind Hoichi is played by Katsuo Nakamura, a relatively young actor who had already amassed twenty film credits when he made
Kwaidan
at age 25. In 2004 he supplied the voice of Dr. Lloyd Steam, the visionary inventor who harnessed steam power in new ways, and grandfather to James Ray Steam, the title hero of Katsuhiro Otomo’s film
Steamboy
. And in 1983 Tatsuya Nakadai, the hapless woodcutter in the “Woman in the Snow” segment, narrated the fifth and final feature film based on Reiji Matsumoto’s
Uchu
Senkan
Yamato
manga (the TV series of which was broadcast in the United States as
Star
Blazers
). Nakadai also appeared in a 1978 live action film based on one of the best-known of Osamu Tezuka’s manga,
Hi
no
Tori
(
The
Phoenix
).

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This book has already looked at a number of haunted houses in anime, and there will be others; yet there’s one more in a popular Japanese movie that probably wouldn’t occur to most ghost hunters.

 56. “Hey! Haven’t you heard? You’re living in a haunted house!”

Animator Hayao Miyazaki went a long way toward establishing his credentials in Japan and around the world—and gave his Studio Ghibli a corporate logo—with his 1988 animated masterpiece
Tonari
no
Totoro
(My
Neighbor
Totoro)
. The plot is deceptively simple and at times surprisingly dark, despite the happy, sunny scenes of life in pastoral rural Japan that make up the movie. A college professor and his two daughters, ages four and ten, move to a country house. The girls are greeted with the above declaration by a neighbor boy, Kanta. He may have meant it as a joke or a tease, but supernatural events do indeed begin happening in short order.

Mei, the younger daughter, encounters several totoro (her childish mispronunciation of troll—
tororu
in Japanese). Only she can see them at first; then, the older sister Satsuki sees them too. The girls also encounter the Catbus, which is exactly what its name suggests, and briefly encounter what can only be called sentient soot: called “makkuro kurosuke” by the girls and “susuwatari” by Kanta’s granny, these dustballs come closest to “haunting” the house. In fact, they really don’t have much of an investment in it; the first night there, as father and daughters play around in the bathtub (a scene which can make some westerners, who see pedophilia in any scene involving parent/child nudity, rather nervous), the “traveling soot” (translation of
susuwatari
) start traveling again. In fact, they ride the wind for more than a decade, reappearing in Miyazaki’s 2001 Academy Award-winning masterpiece
Sen
to
Chihiro
no
Kamikakushi
(known in the US as
Spirited
Away
, a pun which works in both English and Japanese).