A Gathering of Spirits: Japan's Ghost Story Tradition: From Folklore and Kabuki to Anime and Manga (25 page)

Shikigami should not be confused with shinigami, who are the focus of the next manga/anime series:

Yami
no
Matsuei
(Descendants
of
Darkness)

This manga series first appeared in the girls’ manga magazine
Hana
to
Yume
from 1996 to 2002; an anime version appeared in 2000. Officially, the manga by Yoko Matsushita is on hold, and was supposed to start up again in 2010, although the first release in 2010 involved episodes that were first published a decade earlier but have been redrawn.

Shinigami are death spirits, of a type that actually first appeared in western literature; they took root in Japan during the 19
^th
century, although there is some overlap with Shinto shikigami. One aspect of the goddess Izanami, when she appeared to her brother after she was burned to death while giving birth to fire according to the
Kojiki
(Shinto’s creation mythology), is as a shinigami. Other shinigami-like spirits include Enma, the King of Hell (who puts in an appearance in
YuYu
Hakusho
) and Ryuk, the keeper of the notebook in the manga
Death
Note
by Tsugumi Oba and Takeshi Obata, also the artist of the very different
Hikaru
no
Go
.

The shinigami of
Yami
no
Matsuei
are very different from any of their classical counterparts. The central actor in this comedy-drama is Asato Tsuzuki, who has been active for seven decades with the Second Division of the afterlife, sorting out proper and improper human deaths. Tsuzuki’s death was apparently proper; he’s a spirit, which doesn’t stop his ravenous sweet tooth. His beat is Japan’s southern island of Kyushu, which happens to be the homeland of manga artist Matsushita.

As part of the series he picks up a partner, a moody teenager named Hisoka Kurosaki. As they chase various evil spirits around Kyushu, sometimes they have a senior/junior relationship akin to Batman and Robin; at times, though, Kurosaki follows his own agenda, since he’s convinced that he was never told the whole truth about his own death.

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Rasetsu
no
Hana

One of the more recent manga in the ghost-busting genre,
Rasetsu
no
Hana
was created by Chika Shiomi, who also has another supernatural manga,
Yurara
no
Tsuki
, to her credit;
Rasetsu
no
Hana
is actually the sequel to
Yurara
. Serialized in
Hana
to
Yume
, this is the story of yet another young female exorcist; in many ways, it covers familiar ground, but there are a few unique features.

Like Misaki in
Vulgar
Ghosts’
Daydream
, Rasetsu Hyuga is a minor, eighteen years old, yet works full-time as an exorcist. She dropped out of junior high school because she could see spirits—too many of them. But one spirit in particular left its mark on her—literally. The mark resembles a tattoo of a rose on her chest, and the romantic implications are pretty obvious.

This spirit appeared to her when she was fifteen, declaring its love for Rasetsu, and that it would come for her and take her away when she reached adulthood at age twenty—if she did not find love before then. Meanwhile, she seems to be having trouble in that department. Besides being drop-dead beautiful, she’s a bit on the crude side and, like the ghostly detective in
Yami
no
Matsuei
, has an insane sweet-tooth. She works in a ghostbusting agency in Tokyo, where “there seem to be more and more evil spirits that need banishing.” The agency director, Hiichiro Amakawa, detects things about the clients by hugging them; this can get a bit awkward, since he’s very
bishonen
. Another ghostbuster can control people with his voice, and one client, a librarian who can block spirits by casting a water barrier, joins the team after Rasetsu gets him fired from his day job. Here, too, are romantic implications, since this is a young good-looking librarian. This has all the earmarks of the
Ghost
Hunt
cute-meet between Mia and Naru-san.

 CHAPTER 25: MODERN GHOSTS

At the opening of the manga
Black
Bird
by Kanoko Sakurakoji, the heroine Misao, having just reached her sixteenth birthday, talks with friends about (no surprise) boys—one of whom asked for Misao’s e-mail address. She refused to give it to him, because she could see the guy was possessed by the spirit of an aborted child.

Misao is hardly the only manga character with the ability to see past the surface into the spirit world, or to be influenced by a spirit. However, Japan’s culture has undergone countless changes since World War II. While there is often consistency between old and new, it’s sometimes very hard to achieve.

A scene from an episode of Jyoji Akiyama’s popular manga of the 1970s,
Haguregumo
, sums up the distressing state of folk medicine in the mid 1800s: a young girl has been raped and impregnated, and an elderly relative has tied the girl down and is beating on her abdomen in order to induce a miscarriage. The Meiji era brought an emphasis on western medicine, which in turn brought in some new spirit situations.

Life in any nation on Earth is precarious, and Japan is no exception. Miscarriages happen; infants die of illness or accident. The conscious termination of a pregnancy, however, carries with it a degree of guilt that would be hard to understand in the west. In
The
Life
of
an
Amorous
Woman
, written in 1686 by Saikaku Ihara (1642-1693), a prostitute has nightmares of being confronted by the ninety-five pregnancies she had terminated. This is about as extreme an example as can be found of
tatari
, the retribution carried out by the spirit of the fetus. (LaFleur, William R.,
Liquid
Life:
Abortion
and
Buddhism
in
Japan.
, 1992. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 152) Those who believe in such things would state that the fetus is sufficiently aware, perhaps by virtue of having lived before and being reincarnated, to understand what has been done and resent the living for unnaturally terminating the soul’s return to life. (p. 172) On the other hand, some Japanese deny the reality of fetal
tatari
, for a variety of reasons. Tadasu Iizawa, for one, considers it exploitation and compares religious practitioners who make money off of memorializing aborted fetuses to extortionists connected to Japanese organized crime (
yakuza
). (p. 166)

In any case, this is a type of Japanese ghost we’ve encountered before: resentful at the way it was treated in life, even if that life was
in
utero
, and motivated by a desire for retribution that is not subject to rational thought, much less to negotiation. Misao did well in not giving her e-mail to someone possessed by the spirit of a mizuko—literally, a water child, and a euphemism for an aborted fetus. In modern times, rituals and systems have been developed through which the living can apologize to the dead; these include the erection and maintenance of memorial plaques and statues, and even charitable donations of what would have been “child support.” (pp. 221-222)

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Vampire
Princess
Miyu

Ten years after their stylish and creepy quartet of OAVs appeared, creators Toshihiro Hirano and Narumi Kakinouchi put together a 26 week TV series based on the teen vampire, her companion Larva, and their battle against
shinma
—demigods and demons who must be banished from the earth. Overall, the series was less successful than the OAVs, in part because of the need to come up with one
shinma
after another each week, and also because the series set Miyu in a Japanese high school, rather than having her play against the jaded spiritualist Himiko Se.

 83. Taxi?

The sixth TV episode begins with Miyu hailing a taxi at night, and asking to be taken to a cemetery. When the cab gets there, however, she’s gone. What started out as a simple joke by Miyu turns serious when her double turns up and starts biting cabdrivers’ necks.

The “ghostly passenger” motif isn’t just a Japanese urban legend. My hometown of Chicago boasts one of the most illustrious of such ghosts: Resurrection Mary.
[105]
Her story sounds rather similar to this Japanese version:

It was a stormy autumn night, near Aoyama Cemetery, where a taxi driver picked up a poor young girl drenched by the rain. It was dark, so he didn’t get a good look at her face, but she seemed sad and he figured she had been visiting a recently deceased relative or friend. The address she gave was some distance away, and they drove in silence. A good cabbie doesn’t make small talk when picking someone up from a cemetery.

When they arrived at the address, the girl didn’t get out, but whispered for him to wait a bit, while she stared out the window at a second floor apartment. Ten minutes or so passed as she watched, never speaking, never crying; simply observing a solitary figure move about the apartment. Suddenly, the girl asked to be taken to a new address, this one back near the cemetery where he had first picked her up. The rain was heavy, and the driver focused on the road, leaving the girl to her thoughts.

When he arrived at the new address, a modern house in a good neighborhood, the cabbie opened the door and turned around to collect his fare. To his surprise, he found himself staring at an empty back seat, with a puddle where the girl had been sitting moments before. Mouth open, he just sat there staring at the vacant seat, until a knocking on the window shook him from his reverie.

The father of the house, seeing the taxi outside, had calmly walked out bringing with him the exact amount for the fare. He explained that the young girl had been his daughter, who died in a traffic accident some years ago and was buried in Aoyama Cemetery. From time to time, he said, she hailed a cab and, after visiting her old boyfriend’s apartment, asked to be driven home. The father thanked the driver for his troubles, paid him his fare, and sent him on his way.

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Outer space is one of the last places we expect to offer up a ghost story. These stories, especially in Japan, are often tied to a specific place and the events that happened there, and space is still too much of a frontier. However, manga artist Katsuhiro Otomo created a cosmic ghost story when he wrote a film,
Memories
, that is actually three short films, with a different director and a different style for each segment. The first of these stories, called “Madame’s Request” in Japanese and renamed “Magnetic Rose” for the English subtitled version, was directed by Satoshi Kon, who went on to become one of the greatest anime directors of the new generation, with a half-dozen modern classics to his name before his untimely death from cancer in 2010. His feature work includes
Perfect
Blue,
Millennium
Actress,
Tokyo
Godfathers
, and
Paprika
, as well as the
Paranoia
Agent
TV series.

 84. Diva

Late in the 21
^st
century,
[106]
the four-man crew of a salvage vehicle is slowly picking its way through the space equivalent of the Sargasso Sea; instead of seaweed, though, this patch of the cosmos is crowded with derelict spaceships and various kinds of junk. It’s nothing but scrap metal, so the men were surprised to get a signal from one of the derelict ships. It seems to be a distress signal, and, as an even bigger surprise, the ship was the home of a retired opera soprano, around whom a great many rumors circulated.

Although it’s impossible for the diva to still be alive after all these years, two of the crewmen enter the ship to investigate—and that’s when the haunting starts. Lights come up as if on a stage, and the spacemen see the diva: sometimes onstage in costume, sometimes in an open field. One man, Heinrich, sees something that couldn’t possibly have been in the ship’s database: how he bought his daughter Emily a miniature spacesuit for her birthday one year, and how she put it on, climbed up onto the roof, and lost her footing…

There are old films and newspaper clippings suggesting that the diva’s young paramour, believed to have run off, may well have been killed by the jealous soprano. When the ship starts trying to attack the two spacemen, it’s all they can do to try to escape.

The music for this short film was written by Yoko Kanno, one of the greatest modern writers of music for animation. Her score repeats, recycles, and sometimes distorts excerpts from the operas of Giacomo Puccini, notably
Tosca
and
Madama
Butterfly
. You don’t need to know the scores to appreciate the extra dimension they add to the anime, but their inclusion is one of the creepy delights of
Memories
.

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Most ghost stories start with the death of someone, and the consequences of their spirit not traveling on to the afterlife.
Maburaho
takes a bit of a different tack: a situation is set up in which everyone knows that someone is going to die, then it happens. It’s a romantic comedy set in a high school.

Specifically,
Maburaho
was begun as a series of novels written by Toshihiko Tsukiji, with illustrations by Eeji Komatsu. The stories were serialized in
Gekkan
Dragon
magazine and reprinted in book form between 2001 and 2006. The novels were adapted into a manga and the manga was adapted to an anime in 2003. While writing the stories, Tsukiji was asked by the
Gekkan
Dragon
editors to change the rules and extend the life of the hero, Kazuki Shikimori. Tsujiki decided to keep with the plan, killing off the protagonist after six episodes; or, after killing him off, having his ghost keep hanging around.

 85. Only eight times

Kazuki Shikimori was a second year high school student, but his old school wasn’t a typical high school. He transferred from Aoi Academy, one of Japan’s premier magical academies. (No points for guessing which series of books about a young British wizard was as popular in Japan as in the rest of the world.) Kazuki is rather shy and retiring, but he has a good heart and generally does the right thing. Unfortunately, being a nice guy doesn’t get you extra years in the magical world, and Kazuki is at a major disadvantage. In the universe of
Maburaho
, some people can only cast a few hundred spells in their lifetime, and some a few thousand. When you hit your limit, though, you don’t just become a Muggle: you die. Actually, “die” isn’t accurate enough; the magician’s body turns to dust. And Kazuki only had eight spells left in him.

At this point, other members of the student body take an interest in Kazuki’s well-being, and these other students tend to be girls. Yuna Miyama was a childhood friend of Kazuki’s, and as children they informally agreed to marry each other when they grew up; Yuna, being the “nice” girl in Kazuki’s life, seems the strongest candidate. This being a “harem comedy,” a genre in which one guy is enticed by a bevy of attractive females, there are at least a couple of others whose interest in Kazuki is more mercenary. In fact, two other girls are competing for Kazuki on behalf of two warring families. Kuriko Kazetsubaki and Rin Kamishiro are descended from prestigious magical families, and want to keep Kazuki alive since, if he turns to dust, they can’t get to his genes. He’s a physically weak example of a powerful magic family, and would be expected to father a very powerful magician—if he can be kept alive.

Unfortunately, he can’t: he uses his final spell to rescue his childhood friend Yuna from a magical virus. Kazuki’s body may be gone, but his ghost continues to hang around, and even meets with another ghost, who also becomes another member of the “harem”: Elizabeth, whose family goes back centuries. She died during the Holy Roman Empire, where she met a soldier who bore a resemblance to Kuriko Kazetsubaki; eventually Elizabeth’s spirit takes up residence inside Kuriko, who has made peace with Rin in their attempts to restore Kazuki’s body and retrieve his genes.

He’s ultimately brought back, but with a comic twist. With the wish that he have ten times his old life-span, the series ends with… ten different Maburahos, each with the same old life-span.

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Maburaho
represents at least one piece of the manga audience: high school boys. Let’s take a quick look at the other side of the gender divide.