A Gathering of Spirits: Japan's Ghost Story Tradition: From Folklore and Kabuki to Anime and Manga (5 page)

 CHAPTER 5: A LIKELY STORY

Folktales and legends in Japan—about ghosts or anything else—are a major part of that country’s literature. The foundation for these stories is a group of 45 collections, written mostly around the years 1100 and 1200 C. E., although some other major collections are hundreds of years older or younger.

The subject matter of these tales is literally universal. Some stories came to Japan from China or India; others are meant to illustrate Buddhist teachings; still others illustrate small or large events at the royal court. As time and history progress, the emphasis on some subjects grows or declines; the more modern the story, for example, the more likely it is to talk about farming.

While the stories touched on a wide range of activities, those who collected and wrote down these stories were from Japan’s upper classes, since they had both the education in Chinese literary classics and the leisure time to set the stories down with the proper amount of style and grace. If there was one major difference between the legends of Japan and the stories of Greek fable-teller Aesop or the tales collected by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, it is this: the Japanese stories were presumed to be absolutely true; at the very least, they had to appear to be true. Many of the Japanese stories, therefore, go into great detail in describing the time or place in which they happened, no matter how outrageous the events of the story may seem to the modern reader.

The literary style of the original stories varied, with some of the tales told in proper, very serious traditional Chinese and others in more conversational Japanese (in those days, an educated courtier was expected to know both languages). Beyond that, the person who gathered and wrote down the stories (these collectors are almost all anonymous) was expected to edit and shape the stories for maximum effect, making funny stories funnier, making pathetic stories more pathetic, highlighting horror or devotion as needed.

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Looking just at tales of Japanese ghosts, their stories can be put into several groups. These would include dealing with the corpse of a dead person, respecting the spirit that inhabited a body to stop it becoming a vengeful ghost, or pacifying a ghost of someone who died violently or in emotional turmoil. In some extreme cases, this would involve the change of a human ghost into a god.

Following the death of a person, the corpse traditionally was considered a source of pollution and had to be disposed of properly. Generally this meant cremation, but other methods included burying the body or, at least, hiding it in a cave or even an abandoned building.

 10. The Neglected Wife

Did properly dealing with a corpse make a difference? Consider this story from the
Konjaku
monogatari
shuu
(
Tales
of
times
now
past
, generally just called the
Konjaku
), written around the year 1100. It’s the story of a poor man living in Kyoto with his devoted young wife. They couldn’t make ends meet until the man learned that an acquaintance of his had been named governor of a distant province. He went to his acquaintance in search of a position and was hired. But, because the province was so far away, he left his wife behind. He missed her (although not so much that it stopped him from taking up with another woman). Finally the governor’s term of office ended, and the man returned to his wife in Kyoto, arriving at night.

The house he returned to was in ruins, but his wife was still there, and she joyously welcomed him back. They spoke of his life in the faraway province, until they finally fell asleep near dawn, with the husband vowing to use the money he had earned to make everything right by his neglected wife.

When he awoke, he beheld the woman in his arms—except that he was holding a corpse, little more than skin stretched over a skeleton. In a panic, he ran to the house next door and asked what had happened.

“She took sick when her husband left,” the neighbor said, “and died a few months ago. She had no friends or family to dispose of the body, so it’s been there all this time. Everyone in town is afraid to go near the place.”

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That story appears in several different forms, including its retelling by Lafcadio Hearn in the book
Kwaidan
and the film of the same name; not just because it’s a memorable way to creep out one’s audience, but because it reminds its audience of something of vital importance to the Japanese soul. Obligation to the ancestors starts early and extends beyond the grave—and yet the grave itself is a necessary part of the equation. In episode 45 of the
Shaman
King
manga by Hiroyuki Takei, hero Yoh Asakura confronts Faust VIII, a descendant of the western Dr. Faustus, who has tried to keep his murdered wife alive through magic. “Everyone dies, eventually,” Yoh tells Faust. “That’s what makes life precious. If you conquer death, will life still have value?”
[12]
(vol. 6, p. 23)

Respect for the bones of the deceased is part of the traditional Buddhist burial rite, which is why this next story is no less shocking to the Japanese than the story of the man from Kyoto sleeping with his wife’s corpse. The kicker here: whether one believes the above story or not, this next story is absolutely true.

 11. Barefoot Gen—His Mother’s Bones

This is the story of an eight-year-old boy who lived with his family in the city of Hiroshima. On August 6, 1945 he was on his way to school when a single airplane dropped a single bomb over the city. Within a minute, everything had changed: wooden buildings burst into flame, concrete buildings were reduced to rubble and twisted metal, trolley cars were shoved off of their tracks. Some people were vaporized where they stood by the use of the world’s first atomic weapon. That day, some 55,000 people were killed at once; an equal number had to wait for the end, sometimes for years, while radiation devoured their bodies. The boy’s mother survived the blast, like her son, and lived to see her son grow up, get married, and start a career. When she died, everyone realized how sick the bomb had left her.

For this story to carry its full meaning, the reader first must understand the Japanese Buddhist funeral. Once the body is cremated, the ashes are not merely dumped into an urn. The family members take chopsticks and pick the largest bone fragments out of the ashes, passing them from person to person so that each has a chance to pay final respects. The last bones to go into the urn are those of the skull; even a corpse is allowed to have some dignity at the end, and not be buried “upside-down.”

When the boy’s mother was cremated, however, all that came out of the oven was a layer of fine ash, with no bone fragments at all. The mortuary worker explained that he’d seen this often among those who’d lived through the atomic bombing; low-level radiation sickness gradually weakened the bones so that they were consumed by the fire.

The now-grown-up boy, however, was saddened and angry and horrified. He could not pay his final respects to his mother, since her bones were gone. In his anger and sorrow, he decided to use his career to speak out against the evils of atomic warfare that had prevented him, and so many others, from paying respects to their ancestors. The boy kept his promise, growing up to be manga artist Keiji Nakazawa, whose magnum opus was
Hadashi
no
Gen
(
Barefoot
Gen
), a semi-autobiographical account of his life in Hiroshima before and after the atomic bomb.

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Of the several types of Japanese ghosts, the best-known and most easily understood is the jibakurei, a spirit who died violently or in emotional distress, which tied the ghost down to one location. The poor wife above whose husband abandoned her to take a job in a distant province is actually a fairly benign example; we’ll meet many others, especially in modern tales created for manga or the movies. These spirits include the woman who threw herself down a well in grief over finding her child dead (in the manga
Ghost
Hunt
), the psychic girl who was thrown down a well by her own father (in the movie
Ringu
), the dead servant Okiku whose ghostly voice can still be heard coming from the bottom of a well, and a student who died in a storm while trying to protect her sister’s garden (from the manga and anime
Negima!
).

Here are a couple of stories of jibakurei. First, from the
Konjaku
, is a classic example of a sudden and violent death:

 12. A Bolt of Lightning

Long before Kyoto was built, an armed soldier was going along on horseback when a fierce thunderstorm suddenly came up. The rider decided to take shelter under a very tall pine tree. However, a lightning bolt hit the tree, splitting it in two. It also split the rider and his horse in two, turning the rider into a ghost.

Since that time, the city of Kyoto grew around the spot, but, if anyone built a building on the spot where the soldier was hit by lightning, awful things usually happened. You can find the place north of Third Avenue and east of the East Tooin Palace. The building there now is called Demon Hall.

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The next story appears in the
Uji
shuui
monogatari
(
A
later
collection
of
Uji
tales
)
[13]
, written in the early 1200s. Like the previous story, it tells you almost exactly where to find the haunted house at the center of the tale, as if daring the listener to go inside.

 13. Attached to the House

The story is told of a great house near the intersection of Takatsuji and Muromachi streets in Kyoto. The woman who inherited the house from her father lived there with two servants, who were also sisters. The elder sister was married and lived with her husband; the younger entertained guests in her room at the front of the house’s west wing.

The younger sister fell ill and died when she was only twenty-seven years old. They left her body in her room while the older sister and the rest of the household figured out what to do with it. They decided to take the body to the crematory at Toribeno. They put the body in a coffin, put the lid on the coffin, then loaded the coffin onto a carriage.

When they got to the crematory, they noticed that the lid on the coffin was crooked, and that the coffin seemed lighter. This was because there was no body inside it! They retraced their steps, and there was the younger sister’s body, in her old room.

The mourners talked all night about what to do, and finally decided to try again to cremate the body. Early the next day they put the body into the coffin, put the lid on the coffin again, then waited to see what would happen. By sunset, though, they were truly frightened to see that the body was out of the coffin and back in the younger sister’s room. They simply couldn’t move it.

One frustrated mourner scolded the body: “This is what you want? You like it here? Then we’ll leave you here!”

They took up the floor of the front room, dug a hole, and lowered the younger sister into it. They filled in the hole, leaving a large mound. Then everyone moved out of the house, since nobody wanted to stay there with the corpse of the sister. The house fell into ruin and eventually disappeared, but nobody lived anywhere near the mound. Terrible things happened to anybody who lived near it. After about fifty years, somebody built a shrine over the mound, and they say that the shrine is still there.

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There are two things to note about this story. As said above, the younger sister’s spirit is rooted to the spot where she died, even though there wasn’t any violent trauma as with the soldier struck by lightning. The story did note, however, that, although the younger sister was unmarried and had no consistent lover, she did entertain “occasional, casual visitors.” Perhaps it was memories of pleasure, rather than pain, that kept her attached to that place.

Second, we are reminded that there is a way to deal even with persistent spirits: perform a good work of some kind. Recall the disciple of the Buddha who was advised to perform good works to free the spirit of his mother from the realm of the Hungry Ghosts. Of course, you could also be aggressive about it and recruit an exorcist to deal with the spirit. Just be sure that the spiritualist you hire is strong enough to deal with the spirit, because it could turn into quite a struggle. In any event, one thing that you seldom hear in Japan, even in the 21
^st
century, is that “there’s no such thing as ghosts.” Most Japanese know better.

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 14. The Hungry Ghost

The nature of compassion, especially in Buddhism, is to reject hatred, disgust or revulsion, as they get in the way of enlightenment. This is the case in a story from
Kwaidan
by Lafcadio Hearn; the story is titled “Jikininki,” which means “man-eating spirit.”