Authors: Patrick Drazen
A Gathering of Spirits: Japan's Ghost Story Tradition: From Folklore and Kabuki to Anime and Manga (2 page)
CHAPTER 1: TO GET THINGS STARTED
01. “Tell me …”
One night a policeman was walking through his usually quiet neighborhood. He was bored, he was almost asleep; his job had become almost automatic. He rounded one corner… and saw someone on the ground a few yards ahead. He ran forward, and saw what appeared to be a woman who had fallen. Maybe the heel of her shoe had given way, or maybe she was drunk; he didn’t care. At least it was a break in the routine.
“Are you all right, ma’am?” he called out as he approached.
“Help me up, please,” she said in a soft, very pretty voice. Her long hair hid her face. She reached a hand up; the policeman took her hand and helped her to her feet.
“Thank you,” the woman said, raising her head. As she did so, the policeman was able to get a better look at her face… but instead he saw that she had no face. Where there should have been eyes, and a nose, and a mouth, there was nothing—just skin stretched smooth and blank as an egg.
The policeman fell back in shock and horror and ran up the street. He didn’t even know where he was running to at first. After a minute, he saw the lights of a convenience store that stayed open all night. He burst into the store, and blurted out to the older man behind the counter what had just happened to him.
The cashier looked at the policeman for a second, smiled, then said, “Tell me, officer; did she look… like… this?” The cashier waved his hand in front of his own face, and his features vanished, leaving skin stretched smooth and blank as an egg.
xxx
This ghost story, about an encounter with a nopperabou (a faceless ghost), was acted out in the 1994 Studio Ghibli animated movie known as
Ponpoko
[1]
.
It also appeared in print, in English, in 1904 in Lafcadio Hearn’s influential ghost story anthology
Kwaidan
. In fact, this story goes back hundreds of years, and is part of Japan’s long and rich spirit tradition. Stories about Japanese ghosts and other supernatural beings have been written, collected, adapted, reworked, and reinterpreted for centuries, and even the most modern ghost movies, manga (comics) and anime (animation) can refer back to ancient source material.
This book is loosely based on one of these grand and ghostly Japanese traditions, begun back in the Edo period
[2]
: the
hyaku
monogatari
. Literally the phrase means “100 stories,” but the assumption is that these are all ghost stories. Here’s how to play:
Gather some friends together one night, preferably a hot summer night, along with one hundred candles. Once all of the candles are lit, someone tells a ghost story. It can be short or long, historical or recent, frightening or humorous or morally instructive—as this book will show, Japanese ghost stories come in all sorts of flavors. When the first story ends, the storyteller blows out a candle. Then the next person tells a story, blows out a candle, and so on.
By the time the room is down to two or three lit candles, after several hours of ghost stories, everyone’s nerves should be on edge. When the last person finishes the last story and blows out the last candle, plunging the room into blackness, some say that a ghost, invisible in the candlelight, will appear. Others suggest that the party-goers count off in the pitch-black room—and one extra voice will answer.
“My favorite thing about summer,” writes Satsuki Igarashi, one of the cartoonists of the highly successful CLAMP manga collective, “is the ghost stories… . In fact, during summer breaks I would also watch a lot of afternoon TV, and the gossip shows often featured horror stories.”
[3]
Unlike in America, where ghost stories are often told in the autumn around Halloween, ghost stories in Japan are associated with summer for several reasons, and we’ll look at them in greater detail later. For now, let’s just say a major reason is because of the weather; Japan, except for the northernmost island of Hokkaido, has a tropical or semi-tropical climate. The summers get very
mushi-atsui
(humid and hot), and ghost stories were found long ago to be an effective way to send much-needed chills up and down one’s spine.
Prepare for a sampling of Japanese ghosts and spirits, from sources that include the world’s oldest novel, the urban legends of contemporary Japanese schoolchildren, movies both classic and modern, anime, manga, and more. Some of the ghost stories will be actual ghost stories, designed to frighten and shock; sometimes, however, ghosts will appear in unlikely places—in romantic comedies, in sports anime, in domestic dramas, in school stories…
First, though, we have to understand the ground-rules for dealing with the reality of spirits in Japan, especially the fact that reality itself is divided into the human world and the spirit world.
CHAPTER 2: THAT’S THE SPIRIT
T. R. Reid described the years he and his family lived in Tokyo while he was Asian Bureau Chief for the Washington
Post
in his book
Confucius
Lives
Next
Door
. The title referred not just to the sage of China who lived 500 years before Christ, but also to the next door neighbors of the Reids, who embodied so many Confucian virtues. They were an elderly couple, the Matsudas, and one day Mrs. Matsuda passed away at age 78. As Reid placed flowers on the makeshift altar that had been erected in the Matsuda living room, Mr. Matsuda turned to a photograph of his late wife and told it matter-of-factly, “Cho-Cho, it’s Reid-san.”
[4]
It’s tempting for a western reader in the 21
st
century to dismiss this scene as the sentimental gesture of an elderly widower. Doing this, however, misses the point. Mr. Matsuda wasn’t being sentimental, or senile, or ironic. He spoke to the picture of his wife in order to communicate with the spirit of his late wife; nothing more, nothing less.
This motif pops up often in Japan’s pop culture, and not always as practiced by elderly widowers. In one scene in the anime
Princess
Nine
, a TV series about an elite girls’ high school that creates a baseball team to challenge the boys’ high schools, we see the girls’ star pitcher, fifteen-year-old Ryo Hayakawa, stopping before going to school to tell her father what’s been happening. It doesn’t matter that her father’s been dead for ten years; she still communicates with him through the Buddhist altar set up in the Hayakawa home (as it is in so many Japanese homes). In
Ouran
High
School
Host
Club
, the comic manga/anime by Bisco Hatori, heroine Haruhi Fujioka, another first-year high school student, consults with her dead mother via the altar in her apartment.
Similarly, in the romantic comedy manga
Ai
Yori
Aoshi
by Kou Fumizuki, and its anime version, the main character, Kaoru Hanabishi, has decided to take the girl he loves, Aoi-chan, to meet his mother. He picks up flowers, incense, and food, and takes them to a cemetery. He places everything in front of his mother’s tombstone and matter-of-factly introduces Aoi to his mother as the girl who has come to mean everything in his life. Aoi-chan follows up on this, telling Kaoru’s mother about her feelings for her son.
Kaoru, by the way, is a college junior majoring in pre-Law when we meet him; it’s hard to imagine anyone more prosaic and less given to communing with spirits. Yet Kaoru and Ryo and Haruhi do not address their dead parents half-heartedly or ironically. They expect to be heard and understood in the next world.
This kind of spirit communication reflects Japan’s unique spiritual heritage, which is a blend of two different faiths. First came Shinto, which literally means “the path of the gods.” This animistic (based on spirits) religion has been traced back to at least the fifth century B. C. E. and has come to define Japan and its people. Shinto’s creation mythology, the
Kojiki
, attributed the creation of the universe to two divine sibling gods, Izanagi and Izanami; they gave birth to, among other things, the sun goddess Amaterasu, who in turn was regarded as having created the Japanese people. For much of Japan’s history, an article of faith in Shinto was that the line of Japanese emperors was descended from Amaterasu herself; this was abandoned only after Japan lost World War II and the American Occupation redefined the emperor as 100 per cent mortal.
Most important for this book, however, is Shinto’s belief in kami, which can be translated as either “gods” or “spirits.” It would be impossible to list all of the possible kami, since they cover all of creation; they are everywhere and in everything, making Shinto a literally all-encompassing religion. Some kami are guardian spirits of particular locations, from mountains and rivers to islands to vacant lots; some kami are associated with broader geographical areas or certain warrior clans; some kami are highly abstract, associated with the natural world or ideals such as beauty and even evil (Shinto could not imagine evil as having been the result of a separate creation).
This last type of association may be why the 1997 Studio Ghibli animated film
Mononoke-hime
(
Princess
Mononoke
) was considered almost incomprehensible when it was dubbed into English as part of a deal to bring the anime of director Hayao Miyazaki to America. That deal never anticipated a film populated by giant boar kami, giant wolf kami, little potato-headed human-like kami, and the shishigami, the spirit that governs the entire natural world.
Complementing Shinto in Japan is its embrace of Buddhism; a majority of Japanese (84% according to one source) claim to believe in both religions at once. This is possible because the two faiths aren’t mutually exclusive, and one point where they overlap is in the realm of the spirits.
Buddhism arrived in Japan by way of China, where a somewhat unorthodox form of Buddhism (unorthodox according to the traditional Buddhism of India, at any rate), known as Chan Buddhism, later traveled to Japan by way of Korea. With a slight linguistic shift, “Chan” became “Zen” in Japan. However, just as America can accommodate several forms of Christianity, Japan now houses several forms of Buddhism, ranging from the homespun Jodo Shinshu or Pure Land sect to the Soka Gakkai (whose liturgy at times seems a bit too close to show biz). Whatever the sect, Japanese Buddhists interpret Shinto in Buddhist terms and vice versa, with the assortment of buddhas and bodhisattvas (saints) viewed as another form of kami. This history hasn’t always been one of peace and cooperation, and at times some Japanese Buddhist sects have been more militant than others, but in general Japanese Buddhists recognize the need for Shinto to underlie all aspects of Japanese society, providing a sense of history, identity, and continuity.
When it comes to the afterlife and the possibility of ghostly activity on earth, neither Shinto nor Buddhism claim a single authoritative answer. Shinto speaks of the “High Plain of Heaven” and of an unclean underworld, but doesn’t go into much more detail than that. Buddhist interpretations of the afterlife vary from sect to sect and change over time, but among the Buddhist sects who preach an afterlife, they maintain that both heaven and hell are temporary. Spirits of people are born and die and are reborn on earth constantly, in a process leading ultimately to the purest of spirit, divorced from the temptations and corruptions of the physical world. Hell may be necessary to purge away some kinds of corruption, while Heaven may be a reward for work well done in one’s past life, but the cycle still goes on.
Both Shinto and Buddhism recognize the place of honor given to one’s ancestors, and encourage their veneration as, at the least, a matter of simple respect. It’s also a practical consideration; if your ancestors didn’t give birth to your parents, who gave birth to you, where would you be today? In Buddhist terms, this is part of karma, the recognition that everything that happens on earth was caused by certain events, and that every event has consequences. Your ancestors caused you to be born here and now, just as you will cause your descendants to be born; they in turn will regard you as an ancestor worthy of veneration.
In an atmosphere such as Japan’s, in which natural spirits can even be found amid the skyscrapers of downtown Tokyo, and where many homes have their own Buddhist altar or Shinto “god-shelf,” it should be no surprise that spirits are presumed to visit the human world. And when they come to visit from the afterlife, as they do every year, they come to party.