A Gathering of Spirits: Japan's Ghost Story Tradition: From Folklore and Kabuki to Anime and Manga (23 page)

Child molestation is virtually a theme that runs through the 4-part anime, and it’s courageous for director Osamu Sekita to tackle it. But other ghosts appear as well. The spirit of a dead soldier haunts his old family home until Misaki tells him that his parents, too, are dead and that he must join their spirits. Ai is almost killed when she tries to converse with what seemed to be the ghost of a suicide. Instead, the ghost turns into a wrathful woman who almost kills Ai, lamenting that the world shunned her in life because of her “difference.” True, her face is grotesque as a ghost, but does it reflect her looks in life? Was that her “difference”? The anime isn’t too clear here.

As for Kinue, the rope that moves on its own, apparently it’s a “hungry ghost”. In volume 1 of the manga, Misaki tells the rope “you can feed” on the dying man who accidentally killed a toddler. When it’s through, there’s hardly any body left.

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Eerie
Queerie

Shuri Shiozu’s 1999 manga was printed in Japan in
South
magazine and known simply as “Ghost!” The new English title was reportedly required for “copyright related reasons”
[97]
perhaps applied by Tokyopop Publishing to tip off western readers that the supernatural is mixed with
shonen
ai
(Boy Love), although both the scares and the same-sex romance are downplayed at first.

Mitsuo, a student at a boys’ high school who’s also something of a loner, sees dead people. These ghosts have unfinished business, they’re female (at first, anyway), and they’re definitely not out for vengeance. In fact, they possess Mitsuo and use his body to act in ways that cause Mitsuo to be labeled as gay. Most of this labeling by his classmates is more humorous than stigmatizing; one student’s comment that “This is the first time I’ve ever seen a real gay guy”, which is echoed by many of his classmates, reflect the reality that Japanese homosexuals are still very much “in the closet.” Mitsuo, after all, would not do things like ask another boy out on a date if he weren’t being possessed.

 73. An unspoken crush

His first ghost, Kiyomi Suzaka, has only been dead for a week; in life she was a student at a girls’ high school who was hit by a car. Her unfinished business includes trying to get next to Hasunuma, a classmate of Mitsuo at a boys’ high school. He’s taller and darker than Mitsuo and looks decidedly
bishonen
, while Mitsuo is younger, shorter, and looks almost feminine (which is convenient when a female ghost is talking through him). Hasunuma seems to return Mitsuo’s attentions (which are really Kiyomi’s attentions). At one point, Hasunuma whips open his high-school tunic to reveal… more than a dozen ofuda. “I figured you were either schizophrenic or possessed,” he tells Mitsuo.

Mitsuo had earlier submitted to a Shinto exorcism, but the priest was old and clueless; he assumed Mitsuo was possessed either by a fox or a tanuki, the two classic shape-shifter animals of Japanese legend. The fact that Hasunuma’s ofuda work when the priest’s exorcism failed seems to validate a belief in Shinto for the reader while giving it a young person’s perspective. Spirituality, like technology and popular culture, must keep up with the times.

For three days after the amateur exorcism Kiyomi’s spirit is gone; then, Mitsuo hunts for her and finds her where he found her in the first place, at the site of her death. He goes looking for her because, despite her being such a nuisance, he was lonely and missed her. He allows Kiyomi to possess him again; she tells Hasunuma about her crush on him, and it turns out that he too had an unspoken crush on her. This resolution gives Kiyomi the chance to Become One with the Cosmos, and conveniently demonstrates that Hasunuma is heterosexual. When he and Mitsuo decide that they’re now friends after all this, there’s no suspicion that it’s anything but platonic.

 74. For a soccer ball

Mitsuo moves from a schoolgirl to an adult woman in his next ghost. Natsuko Shiiba had a set routine when she was hit by a truck at age 22: as she walked to work, she would see a young boy, Ichi Shirai, practicing with a soccer ball, and sometimes stopped to encourage him. One day, she chased the ball as it went into the street…

She spent the next six years hating and haunting Ichi, even though he couldn’t see or hear her. But, like Kiyomi, she is no longer vengeful. She came to realize that “blaming Ichi was easier than blaming myself,” and that there were a number of variables involved in her death. Most importantly, even though the young Ichi left the ball in the street that day, to have an excuse to talk to the beautiful lady, Natsuko no longer regrets chasing the ball, nor does she blame Ichi for her death. As Mitsuo (possessed by Natsuko) tells Ichi (who turns out to be a classmate of Mitsuo), “I decided to pick up that ball of my own free will. I’m responsible for the life I chose.” Ichi had meanwhile spent six years blaming himself for her death, and refusing to ever play soccer again; after telling Ichi to forgive himself and “cherish every moment of your precious life,” she too drifts off to Become One with the Cosmos.

This ghost story is barely about the ghosts in it at all, except for the ways they are expected to conform to the behavioral ideals of the living. The female ghosts cannot become reborn until they become
yasashii
. Kiyomi, who was only dead six days, couldn’t work up the courage to talk to Hasunuma in life: “I hated myself for being such a coward. I kept saying I’d change eventually.” She got over her self-hatred by possessing Mitsuo and doing what she needed to do in life. Natsuko began her career as a ghost by hating Ichi, but later realized that his role in her death was just part of a larger, more complicated picture. In both cases, compassion leads these women to forgive and move on, and, perhaps not so ironically in a society still largely driven by male privilege, they could not exercise their compassion without the help of a male. A different
mangaka
might have had these ghosts encounter a
miko
, but, since the objects of their quests were both students at a boys’ high school (which becomes symbolic of the demarcation of adolescent sexual roles in Japan), it would have been much more difficult for another female to act on their behalf.

So, does
Eerie
Queerie
exist to teach attitudes to males or to females? Probably both, since
Ghost!
ran in a
manga
magazine that focused on
bishonen
. Humor and sentimentality balance each other out. In any event, any sexual paradigm exists to teach both genders what is expected of them, while in this case also teasing the reader with hints of “the love that dare not speak its name.” Neither males nor females live their lives in a vacuum, and behavioral instructions to one gender must always occur, overtly or implicitly, in context to the other.

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But let’s get back to the bishonen boys of
Eerie
Queerie
. Ichi now hangs out with Mitsuo and Hasunuma, even though things begin looking like a romantic triangle. In the four-part story “I Miss You,” the geometry expands to a romantic pentagram—one which incorporates both the quick and the dead.

 75. I miss you

Mitsuo feels as if he’s being followed. Despite the diligence of Ishi and Hasunuma, the ghost of a boy in a school uniform appears to Mitsuo, and arranges to meet him in the Drama Club room after school. Once there, the ghost, named Kanau, tries to push Mitsuo out the window. Hasunuma grabs for Mitsuo, and they fall out together. They live, but Hasunuma is in a coma; as a Shinto priest (young and bishonen, of course) explains, his spirit is detached from his body. This priest, named Mikuni, has a taste for guys as well as for “playing games”—first with Hasunuma’s spirit, then with Kanau’s.

The
Eerie
Queerie
series ran long enough to be printed in four paperback volumes, but Shiozu got sidetracked; in the middle of the story he was commissioned to create a manga for
Dear
T
, which he described as “the main publication for boys’ love series.”

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In the manga/anime
Yuyu
Hakusho
, the teen punk named Yusuke finds out that he has died from a cute young girl in traditional kimono, riding the oar of a boat. Her name is Botan, which in this case is a loaded name. Botan is a popular brand of Japanese rice, as well as a popular brand of candy. But botan (Japanese for peony) calls up its most supernatural association with another of the classic ghost stories: the
Kaidan
Botan
Doro
(Ghost Story of the Peony Lantern).

 76. The Peony Lantern

This particular tale came over in the early 1600s from China, in a series of stories that were Buddhist morality lessons told as ghost tales, like the
Ugetsu
Monogatari
. In 1666 Asai Ryoi adapted this story, among others, into a collection titled
Otogi
Boki
(Hand Puppets), changing the Chinese locales to Japanese ones. The story took on new life in 1884 when it was adapted into a rakugo, a kind of stylized monologue. In 1892
Kaidan
Botan
Doro
was further adapted as a kabuki play, and a prose version of the stage version appears in Lafcadio Hearn’s
In
Ghostly
Japan
. The story’s also been adapted to the modern stage; the kabuki version’s been filmed.

In the original, the story begins appropriately on the first night of Obon. Appropriately, since this is a love story between the living and the dead. A samurai widower named Shinnojo Ogiwara sees two figures walking down the road in front of his home. As they draw closer, he sees that they are a woman with a servant-girl who’s holding a peony lantern. The lady is quite beautiful, so he stops them and engages in conversation. After learning that the lady’s name is O-Tsuyu (which has been Romanized several different ways), they vow eternal love. For the next few evenings, the woman and her servant come to the home of the samurai at dusk, always leaving before dawn. An elderly neighbor, however, becomes suspicious, looks in on the samurai one night, and sees him in bed embracing a skeleton. In the morning he tells Ogiwara about his beloved; the shaken samurai consults a Buddhist priest, who tells him to place a protective charm around his house to keep the ghost away. The charm prevents O-Tsuyu from entering his house that night, so she calls to the samurai to come out; unable to resist, he leaves the house to go to her place. “Her place” is a newly-dug grave on the grounds of a temple, but he doesn’t care. In the morning, Ogiwara’s body is found in the grave embracing a skeleton.

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 77. Let’s Spend the Night Together

The resident ghosts of Saito High School, in the
Haunted
Junction
anime series, are usually more than a handful for the Holy Student Council: three teen clerics (a Buddhist monk, a Shinto miko, and a Christian exorcist) who are generally excused from the more mundane aspects of high school. The haunted high school, however, attracts other ghosts, with some posing bigger challenges than others.

Episode 3, “Love to the point of possession”, begins with a pretty young girl uttering her “final prayer.” We meet the girl in the next scene, when Ryudo the Buddhist student monk and Haruto the Christian student exorcist meet her outside the school gate. The girl asks the monk to lend her his body. No, not like that.

In life, she was a waitress at a coffee-house where she met Toshi, a musician with an up-and-coming group. She said it was “love at first sight,” but they hadn’t even had a month together when she was killed in a traffic accident. She wanted to see Toshi again, but he couldn’t see her, unless she inhabited a living body. She was a ghost with unfinished business, since Toshi had asked her to spend a night with him before she died.

This put things in a different light for Ryudo; he wasn’t about to let her inhabit his body so that another guy could have sex with it. He was just too much of a skirt-chaser, especially of the school’s Toilet Hanako ghost. Mutsuki, the miko on the Holy Student Council, gets into a spiritual battle royal with Ryudo, trying to force him to let the girl possess him, but the girl calls a halt, not wanting such a bother for her sake and apologizing for not realizing Ryudo’s feelings. After she leaves, the principal (a ghost himself) reveals that her spirit is now too weak to sustain itself past midnight, so the girl (whose name, we finally learn, is also Hanako) has one chance left at her unfinished business.

We also learn another reason why Hanako couldn’t approach Toshi: some of his other fans were complaining that Toshi had stopped singing since Hanako died. She also explains what a night together would involve; no, not that. Toshi had written a song for her, and called Hanako to ask if he could spend an entire night singing his song to her, an audience of one. However, she died the next day.