A Gathering of Spirits: Japan's Ghost Story Tradition: From Folklore and Kabuki to Anime and Manga (24 page)

Ryudo has an immediate change of heart, since no other body parts are involved. Toshi and his female fans go directly to Saito High School, where Toshi was once a student. He’s used to the school’s ghostly activity, but the other girls flee in terror. Up on the roof, Toshi can not only see Hanako, without her possessing anyone, but can embrace her; the principal chalks it up to the school’s “special powers.” Toshi serenades her, and she Becomes One with the Cosmos, thanking Toshi and the Holy Student Council.

Despite being aired “after hours” in Japan and having a few ribald bits (the principal, for example, wants to prepare Ryudo for his date with Toshi by castrating him with a pair of garden shears), typically episodes of
Haunted
Junction
ended like this: sweet and sentimental, or with a dose of crazy slapstick. The tease of Ryudo dating another guy was just that: a tease.
Eerie
Queerie
is a mild example of Boy Love, and broadcast anime seldom goes any farther.

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 78. Babysitter

An apparent
yukionna
puts in an interesting appearance in the episode of
InuYasha
titled “The Snow of Seven Winters Past.” During a summer snowstorm, Miroku the young, lecherous monk encounters Koyuki, whose name and pallid complexion should have been a giveaway. She enlists Miroku’s aid, not to feed off of him (as she almost did years ago, when he was a child lost in a snowstorm), but to take care of dozens of infants in her keeping. Actually, these are all spirits of children abandoned or orphaned by war, whom Koyuki sought to care for. Yet she claims that she was the mother of all these children, and Miroku was the father!

Was she a snow ghost? Not in the classic sense. She too was a victim of war (the
InuYasha
series allowed Rumiko Takahashi, for truly the first time in her career, to deliver a clear antiwar message). The real villain here, and even this is not necessarily evil, was a lion-like ice demon who killed the victims lured by Koyuki, feeding their souls to her.

Did Koyuki also have some goodness in her? Of course, since she sought help from the living to care for the children, even though they were spirits. Miroku recognizes this, and at the end of the episode erected a shrine to Koyuki and is seen praying for her soul. Japanese cartoons are seldom simple, and Miroku’s leading role in this episode reinforces a Buddhist article of faith illustrated here: that all sentient beings, presumably including snow-ghosts, are capable of enlightenment.

From a perspective based on western feminism, Japan’s history has never given women parity with men. Modern times have seen attempts to level the social field (less during the militant, conservative era from the Taisho emperor to the 1945 surrender), but little has changed by western standards. Of course, the problem is largely a matter of perspective: the western standards used to evaluate feminism in Japan have little to do with centuries of Japanese culture.

And what of Miroku? This teenaged Buddhist priest is caught between his vow of celibacy and his hormonal attraction to any and every female he meets; yet, his come-ons are so inept that the reader/viewer can come to only one conclusion: Miroku is still a virgin. So how could he accept the yukionna’s claim that he sired all of her babies? Surely he would have remembered something like that. Why doesn’t he protest his lack of paternity, instead turning with alacrity to care for the children?

The answer may lie in a famous old Zen Buddhist “joke,” one of many teaching stories told about the faith and its practitioners. In this story, a young unmarried girl conceives and bears a child. When her father repeatedly demands that she name the father, the girl finally names the priest at the local Buddhist temple. The girl’s father angrily takes the infant to the temple and thrusts it at the priest, telling him to take care of his own child. The priest didn’t protest his innocence or deny fathering the child. Instead, he spoke only one sentence: “Sou desu ka?”—Is it so?

Six months passed, during which the priest, totally unaccustomed to bringing up a baby, nevertheless tried his best. At the end of that time, the young girl finally broke down and confessed that the baby’s father was really a young man from a neighboring village. Her father immediately rushed to the temple and apologized profusely to the priest. As he handed back the baby, the priest spoke only one sentence: “Sou desu ka?”

This brief story contains a number of object lessons—accepting responsibility, whether it’s fair or not, while not growing attached to the things of this world, taking all circumstances equally, and sometimes living as if truth is irrelevant. There is also the object-lesson of Buddhism’s belief that all people are capable of receiving enlightenment: in this case, the man whose daughter finally stops lying to him. Perhaps most important, though, is simply the belief that compassion must be shown to all sentient beings without discrimination. This certainly applies to Miroku when a roomful of bawling infants is forced upon him. Even if he had not sired any of them, they all need help now, and he is in a position to give it. To walk away from that responsibility would be to abandon a core teaching of his faith. Miroku does not regret having to play with, feed, and diaper a few dozen babies who are not his own; yet he also feels no regret when that responsibility is taken from him as suddenly as it arrived. Given that Miroku often comes onstage in
InuYasha
either to battle demons or to serve as comic relief, this encounter with a sort-of
yukionna
may be his finest hour.

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Finally, we can cut out the references to compassion, sincerity, and all of that, and turn to a bit of comedic ghost porn. The
F
³
series of hentai (literally “perverted,”, the word generally means “sexual”) anime created in 1994 center on a woman who can’t reach orgasm, no matter who does what to her. The third installment shows our heroine and a houseful of other women invaded by a wandering, lecherous ghost. At first it possesses one of the women (possession also causing her to grow a penis); it’s then exorcised into several of the sex toys in the house. It finally ends up in an inflatable human love-doll
[98]
; the women throw away the doll, which proceeds to molest the garbagemen who find it…

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 79. Chaperone from beyond?

Volume two of the
Ghost
Hunt
manga has a side-story that, while more benign than the main ghost story, is also more classically Japanese in its presentation of the ghost; it’s almost a young people’s version of the
Yotsuya
Kaidan
as it pokes some gentle fun at the image of the female ghost out for revenge. Celebrity itako (medium) Masako Hara tells her colleagues at Shibuya Psychic Research that a television crew has been trying to film in a Tokyo park, but shooting has been interrupted by water mysteriously falling on the cast; research indicates that this phenomenon has also afflicted others in the past six months. In addition, the mysterious downpour only affects romantic couples (or actors pretending to be a couple).

The mystery is cleared up when Masako becomes possessed by the troublesome spirit: that of a young woman who attempted suicide in the park six months before. She had met a young man there, and the two of them had dated, but one day she saw him with another woman. She confronted her boyfriend, who poured a bottle of water on her. She wanted to commit suicide in the park, but, after some failed attempts, she died in a most tragi-comic manner: she tripped over a cat, banged her head on a curb, and died.
[99]

Since then, she tried to appear as a ghost to her unfaithful boyfriend, but he was too insensitive to even notice her. In frustration, the ghost decided to disrupt other couples’ happiness, delighting in their misfortune. Mai and the monk point out to the ghost that revenge born of envy isn’t really making her happy; the ghost agrees, thanks them for listening to her story, and allows herself to be exorcised. The last picture of her is as she was at the time of her death, with half of her face bloodied by the head wound. This parallels her to Oiwa of
Yotsuya
Kaidan
, not only recalling the facial distortion caused by the medicine, but also the general theme of a woman betrayed through no fault of her own.

Although the manga does not name the park, a Japanese reader would probably assume the location is a place where couples may run into ghostly trouble: Tokyo’s Inokashira Park.
[100]
The park’s current reputation is as one of the most hostile places for a date. The cause of the problem? One of the Seven Chinese Good Luck Gods, the goddess Benzaiten, is believed to reside in Inokashira Park. She’s also believed to be so sensitive and so jealous that any display of affection by human couples puts her into a rage. Relationships are endangered simply by holding hands or kissing, or even by riding one of the paddleboats on the lake. Couples are advised to either stage an argument or pretend that they’re strangers to each other, to avoid the wrath of Benzaiten.

Does this really hold in the 21
^st
century—worrying about interference from a Chinese ghost? The shrine to Benzaiten has been there for centuries; the artist Hiroshige created a beautiful woodprint,
The
Benzaiten
Shrine
at
Inokashira
in
the
Snow
, in the 1760s.
[101]
The park was officially created in 1918. There’s no way of knowing how far back rumors of Benzaiten’s influence goes, but certainly the most dramatic end of a love affair in Inokashira Park took place in 1948, when renowned novelist Osamu Dazai and his lover committed suicide in the park.
[102]

Still, the park attracts all sorts of visitors, because of its ponds, its cherry trees, its musical performances, and, near one end of the park, the Ghibli Museum, commemorating the work of Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, creators of some of Japan’s finest anime.

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“Monk-san” answers one question that Mai asks and certainly one that some readers will have pondered: is there justice in letting the spirit of the dead girl Become One with the Cosmos when her creep boyfriend is never held to account for the shabby way he treated her?
[103]
At least Yusuke in
YuYu
Hakusho
reached out and punished the guy who disrespected his girlfriend, after she’d spent months as a
jibakurei
.

The monk’s response is simply a statement of faith that karma eventually will catch up to the creep. This belief that a kind of supra-natural justice, handed down by Fate or The Universe, will ultimately rectify everything may seem too passive for the action-oriented west, but Buddhism is about taking the long view. This confidence that everything happens for a larger purpose and that justice will ultimately be served helps to explain why Japan is one of the least litigious nations on earth.

 CHAPTER 24: GHOSTBUSTERS

Not all spirits are benign, but exorcising the ones that need to rest in peace, because of the problems they’re causing in the human world, often requires a specialist. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of these, whether in the world of anime/manga or the real world.

Old-school manga titles about ghostbusters include:

GS
Mikami

One of the best-known and longest-running comic manga based on a psychic (although it has yet to be translated for American readers),
GS
(for
Ghost
Sweeper)
Mikami:
Gokuraku
Daisakusen!!
(
GS
Mikami:
Big
Paradise
Battle!!
) was created for
Shonen
Sunday
in 1991 by Takashi Shiina; it ran until 1999 and spun off into a year’s worth of weekly anime and a one-hour movie.

The story is simple: Reiko Mikami (the kanji of her name means “beautiful goddess”) is a voluptuous redhead who’s also a gifted psychic. She’s in it for the money; she charges outrageous fees for her services, and is capable of attacking her clients if they don’t pay their bills. She saves money by hiring as an assistant a high school student named Tadao Yokoshima. She pays him ¥250 per hour (about $2.65), and he goes along with it for one reason: his boss is a voluptuous redhead, and he hangs around hoping to peek in on Mikami in the bath, a hot springs, or somewhere else requiring skimpy attire.

Yokoshima has a few latent psychic abilities, but he’s only one of several assistants to Mikami. These include an exorcist named Father Karas (yes, named after the priest in
The
Exorcist
), and Meiko Rokudo, a soft-spoken young girl who has a dozen shikigami spirits within her. They appear when Meiko loses her composure—which she does quite a lot.

 80. A Ghost Sweeper’s Apprentice

However, Mikami’s most valuable apprentice appears in the first episode of the manga series: a onetime miko named Kinu Himuro, generally called Okinu. She’s sweet, compassionate, but sometimes a bit dense.

Their association started when Mikami and Yokoshima went up into the Japanese Alps to exorcise a ghost that was bothering the clients of a volcanic hot springs resort. As Mikami and Yokoshima were walking down the road, they were watched by a ghostly woman. Deciding that Yokoshima is good for her plans, she approaches him, asking him to fetch some medicine for her; when he tries to fetch the medicine, from a death-trap stage that would have fooled nobody, he’s almost crushed by a boulder. The woman is in fact trying to kill Yokoshima.

Once they get to the resort, Mikami and Yokoshima go hunting for the ghost, and in short order they find him: a mountaineer who got lost during a climb and died. He asks Mikami to rescue his body; she indirectly agrees, sending Yokoshima into the snowy night up the mountain with the ghost while she stays warm and comfortable at the inn.

Yokoshima, slogging through the snow, encounters the woman who’s still trying to kill him. The mountaineer, meanwhile, wants to show Yokoshima how manly mountaineers keep warm in a snowstorm, which is not Yokoshima’s idea of fun. Yokoshima instead chases the woman, even as he’s chased by the mountaineer’s ghost; they all run right down the mountain and into Mikami’s hot springs.

Okinu, the woman, explains that she died some three hundred years ago, when she was sacrificed to the volcano god. However, she never actually crossed over to become a mountain spirit. With Mikami’s help, the mountaineer’s spirit becomes god of the mountain; as for Okinu, she was supposed to let go of her life on the mountain and Become One with the Cosmos—except that she forgot how to do that. Mikami takes Okinu on as an assistant, for 30 yen per day.

 81. Beware of Cat

Another early episode highlights both Mikami’s flexible attitude towards the ghosts she’s paid to exorcise and her major concern: money. The episode titled “Ookamitachi no Shigo” (Post-Mortem for the Wolves) deals, despite the title, with bank robbers.

The first scene takes place outside the Kanegura Bank, as two would-be hold-up men drive toward their target. However, a cat wanders into the road, the driver swerves to avoid it, and runs into a lamppost. We next see a bouquet of flowers laid at the lamppost; an indication that the robbers died in the crash. However, we also see their ghosts out on the sidewalk in front of the bank, looking through the window as Mikami meets with the bank manager. The ghosts can’t rest in peace while they have unfinished business on earth; in this case, robbing the bank. Putting up anti-ghost protective charms around the bank would keep away the ghosts, but also drive away customers. Mikami wants to charge the bank ¥100 million to banish the ghosts; the bank manager refuses to pay more than ¥10 million.

Mikami decides to play both ends against the middle. She talks the bank into letting her take part in a robbery prevention drill. Meanwhile, she arranges with the ghosts to help them rob the bank. By carrying out their unfinished business, they can rest in peace; and, because they can’t take the money with them to the afterlife, Mikami would be happy to take it off their hands.

Mikami and company pull off the robbery, taking about ¥300 million in 30 seconds. As the ghosts happily Become One with the Cosmos, Mikami and Yokoshima are chased, and caught, by the bank’s tellers, acting as their own police force. At first, Mikami seems broken up about having to give back the money. All is not lost: back at the bank, Okinu-chan is using one of the computers to transfer ¥1 billion to a Swiss bank account.

The percentage of manga that have been translated into English is relatively small.
GS
Mikami
is one of the titles that hasn’t come over, and it should. Even though it dates from the Nineties, is long (running to some thirty-plus volumes), and may be considered “Old School,” it’s imaginative, well-drawn and, most important, funny.

Jigoku
Sensei
Nube

This series started appearing in
Shonen
Jump
magazine in 1993, and ran for 6 years as part of the interest in school ghost stories. Artist Takeshi Okano and writer Shou Makura sets the action in the fifth grade of a modern school; the teacher, Meisuke Nueno, is an exorcist and comes from a long line of exorcists. His father got into trouble with one exorcism, and Meisuke saw no choice but to take the demon into himself. This is why he keeps his left hand gloved: his left hand is now a demon’s claw, which he uses to perform magical feats. Apparently, in his school, there’s often a need for magic.

Nueno has run up against most of the standard psychic threats, from spirits raised by kokkuri-san to walking anatomy statues. He’s also had to deal with evil people and mythical beasts; in one early episode, a student is harassed by a kappa, a half-human half-turtle spirit, who was actually only trying to warn the school that it had been built over an unexploded bomb from World War 2.

Yugen
Kaisha

I think of this series as “GS Mikami Lite”. It has many of the same ingredients as the manga by Takashi Shiina: the psychic detective agency is run by Ayaka Kisaragi, a vivacious redhead who sees ghostbusting as a relatively cheap and easy way to make money. She has a small stable of assistants, some of whom are children. And, contrary to expectations, the business never seems to turn a profit.

The name translates as Phantom Quest Corporation (but the pronunciation of the kanji is the same as for the more mundane “Limited Corporation”). Four OAV anime episodes were created, and a supplemental episode (known as Part Zero) featured the origins of the series. Beyond dealing with Dracula and an extreme sect of Buddhist monks, the company really only has to deal with one ghost—and he turns out to be one of the good guys.

 82. Love Among the Mummies

The episode starts with a night watchman at a museum where an exhibit of artifacts from ancient Egypt is about to open—complete, it seems, with ghost.

We jump to the head of Phantom Quest Corp. meeting with the young and handsome head of the Nakasugi Corporation, underwriters of the exhibition. They then meet separately with Natsuki Ogawa, the young woman who’s curator of the exhibit. She’s concerned about the success of the exhibition, while Nakasugi is more of a sexual predator chasing after various women on his staff. He cancels the night shift installation of the exhibit, then tries to use this to put pressure on Ogawa, but the ghost intervenes.

The ghost is Higashi Narita, a graduate student who unearthed the artifacts as well as Ogawa’s boyfriend at the time of his death. Nakasugi is persistent, however, hinting that Ogawa has to keep him happy to ensure that the exhibition opens. Ayaka, meanwhile, forms a pact with Narita, who sacrificed his life to find the Egyptian ruins. Narita goes after Nakasugi, who’s getting grabby with Ogawa; Nakasugi isn’t killed, but suffers an equally bad fate: he’s caught embezzling from the corporation and fired—which is also bad news for Ayaka and the Phantom Quest Corp, since they won’t get paid.

Vampire
Princess
Miyu
: Himiko Se
[104]

Vampire
Princess
Miyu
started out as a series of four OAV episodes produced in 1988. Directed by Toshiki Hirano, these moody and atmospheric episodes tell of a vampiric princess, apparently frozen at age fourteen. She doesn’t behave according to traditional western vampire lore, although she does suck the blood of the living. Her actual task is to search for
shinma
, “divine demons” who have escaped from the spirit world into the human world. Miyu, accompanied by a companion shinma named Larva, must find and dispel the shinma while a spiritualist, Himiko Se, crosses Miyu’s path in the OAV. (A 26-week television series, also directed by Hirano, was broadcast in Japan in 1997-1998, but its
shinma
are clearly demonic; only the one appearing in the third OAV episode behaves like a ghost. In this episode, Miyu and Himiko set out in search of a huge antique suit of Japanese armor, a prized family heirloom. This armor, however, has been possessed by one shinma on orders from another, Lemures, who knew Larva. As Himiko tries to exorcise the spirit from the armor, the shinma try to turn Larva’s loyalty away from Miyu. They fail, and Lemures is banished.)

One of the fascinating aspects of the OAV series is Himiko Se, the professional spiritualist. She’s statuesque, sophisticated, and very beautiful; however, much of what we see is a façade. She knows that spiritualism isn’t paying the bills, and seems rather mercenary at times. We also see her in several episodes conducting arcane Buddhist exorcism rituals, with a skill that impresses even Miyu. From beginning to end, Himiko is portrayed as neither good not bad.

Like Miyu herself. In the OAV Miyu explains that her father was a human while her mother was a vampire; she came into her heritage as a shinma-fighter after World War II when her parents died. While Himiko chases after vampires, possessed suits of armor, and a variety of spirit assignments, Miyu’s work is very specific. The overlap occurs only in the OAV series, at the end of which we learn that Miyu and Himiko have met before, years ago…

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Muyo
to
Roji
no
Mahouritsu
Soudan
Jimusho

A more benign bunch of juvenile ghosthunters are featured in Nishi Yoshiyuki’s manga
Muyo
to
Roji
no
Mahouritsu
Soudan
Jimusho
(Muyo
&
Roji’s
Bureau
of
Supernatural
Investigation)
. There’s a bit of artistic influence of Hino Hideki in Muyo Toru, the shorter senior of the spirit-chasing kids who have their own third-floor office. The diminutive and somewhat creepy Muyo is a “magical lawyer”; this isn’t about exorcism, after all, but about justice, for both the quick and the dead. Roji is the enforcer; tall, thin, friendly-looking, and (in keeping with lawyerly fashion) wears suspenders. His real name is Jiro, but he reverses the letters and calls himself Roji. This duo, which has appeared in
Shonen
Jump
and a sister publication since 2004, has already been discussed in the Spirit Photography chapter; they’ll return with our look at Train Ghosts.

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Looking at
GS
Mikami
above, we note that one of Mikami’s assistants, Meiko Rokudo, has access to a dozen spirit helpers called shikigami. There’s a pretty large body of literature just on these (literally translating the name) ceremonial spirits who do the bidding of onmyouji, shamans who are practitioners of this Shinto-related magic. Most shikigami are invisible, but they manifest to onmyouji in a variety of animal shapes, or as child-sized demons.