Japanese Ghost Stories

by Lafcadio Hearn

  Elements of primeval fears – fears older than humanity – doubtless enter into the child-terror of darkness. But the more definite fear of ghosts may very possibly be composed with inherited results of dream-pain – ancestral experience of nightmare. And the intuitive terror of supernatural touch can thus be evolutionally explained.

  Let me now try to illustrate my theory by relating some typical experiences.

  II

  When about five years old I was condemned to sleep by myself in a certain isolated room, thereafter always called the Child’s Room. (At that time I was scarcely ever mentioned by name, but only referred to as ‘the Child’.) The room was narrow, but very high, and, in spite of one tall window, very gloomy. It contained a fire-place wherein no fire was ever kindled; and the Child suspected that the chimney was haunted.

  A law was made that no light should be left in the Child’s Room at night – simply because the Child was afraid of the dark. His fear of the dark was judged to be a mental disorder requiring severe treatment. But the treatment aggravated the disorder. Previously I had been accustomed to sleep in a well-lighted room, with a nurse to take care of me. I thought that I should die of fright when sentenced to lie alone in the dark, and – what seemed to me then abominably cruel – actually locked into my room, the most dismal room of the house. Night after night when I had been warmly tucked into bed, the lamp was removed; the key clicked in the lock; the protecting light and the footsteps of my guardian receded together. Then an agony of fear would come upon me. Something in the black air would seem to gather and grow – (I thought that I could even hear it grow) – till I had to scream. Screaming regularly brought punishment; but it also brought back the light, which more than consoled for the punishment. This fact being at last found out, orders were given to pay no further heed to the screams of the Child.

  Why was I thus insanely afraid? Partly because the dark had always been peopled for me with shapes of terror. So far back as memory extended, I had suffered from ugly dreams; and when aroused from them I could always see the forms dreamed of, lurking in the shadows of the room. They would soon fade out; but for several moments they would appear like tangible realities. And they were always the same figures … Sometimes, without any preface of dreams, I used to see them at twilight-time – following me about from room to room, or reaching long dim hands after me, from story to story, up through the interspaces of the deep stairways.

  I had complained of these haunters only to be told that I must never speak of them, and that they did not exist. I had complained to everybody in the house; and everybody in the house had told me the very same thing. But there was the evidence of my eyes! The denial of that evidence I could explain only in two ways: Either the shapes were afraid of big people, and showed themselves to me alone, because I was little and weak; or else the entire household had agreed, for some ghastly reason, to say what was not true. This latter theory seemed to me the more probable one, because I had several times perceived the shapes when I was not unattended; and the consequent appearance of secrecy frightened me scarcely less than the visions did. Why was I forbidden to talk about what I saw, and even heard – on creaking stairways – behind wavering curtains?

  ‘Nothing will hurt you’ – this was the merciless answer to all my pleadings not to be left alone at night. But the haunters did hurt me. Only – they would wait until after I had fallen asleep, and so into their power – for they possessed occult means of preventing me from rising or moving or crying out.

  Needless to comment upon the policy of locking me up alone with these fears in a black room. Unutterably was I tormented in that room – for years! Therefore I felt relatively happy when sent away at last to a children’s boarding-school, where the haunters very seldom ventured to show themselves.

  They were not like any people that I had ever known. They were shadowy dark-robed figures, capable of atrocious self-distortion – capable, for instance, of growing up to the ceiling, and then across it, and then lengthening themselves, head-downwards, along the opposite wall. Only their faces were distinct; and I tried not to look at their faces. I tried also in my dreams – or thought that I tried – to awaken myself from the sight of them by pulling at my eyelids with my fingers; but the eyelids would remain closed, as if sealed … Many years afterwards, the frightful plates in Orfila’s Traité des Exhumés,1 beheld for the first time, recalled to me with a sickening start the dream-terrors of childhood. But to understand the Child’s experience, you must imagine Orfila’s drawings intensely alive, and continually elongating or distorting, as in some monstrous anamorphosis.

  Nevertheless the mere sight of those nightmare-faces was not the worst of the experiences in the Child’s Room. The dreams always began with a suspicion, or sensation of something heavy in the air – slowly quenching will – slowly numbing my power to move. At such times I usually found myself alone in a large unlighted apartment; and, almost simultaneously with the first sensation of fear, the atmosphere of the room would become suffused, half-way to the ceiling, with a somber yellowish glow, making objects dimly visible – though the ceiling itself remained pitch-black. This was not a true appearance of light: rather it seemed as if the black air were changing color from beneath … Certain terrible aspects of sunset, on the eve of storm, offer like effects of sinister color … Forthwith I would try to escape – (feeling at every step a sensation as of wading) – and would sometimes succeed in struggling half-way across the room; but there I would always find myself brought to a standstill – paralyzed by some innominable opposition. Happy voices I could hear in the next room; I could see light through the transom over the door that I had vainly endeavored to reach; I knew that one loud cry would save me. But not even by the most frantic effort could I raise my voice above a whisper … And all this signified only that the Nameless was coming – was nearing – was mounting the stairs. I could hear the step – booming like the sound of a muffled drum – and I wondered why nobody else heard it. A long, long time the haunter would take to come – malevolently pausing after each ghastly footfall. Then, without a creak, the bolted door would open – slowly, slowly – and the thing would enter, gibbering soundlessly – and put out hands – and clutch me – and toss me to the black ceiling – and catch me descending to toss me up again, and again, and again … In those moments the feeling was not fear: fear itself had been torpified by the first seizure. It was a sensation that has no name in the language of the living. For every touch brought a shock of something infinitely worse than pain – something that thrilled into the innermost secret being of me – a sort of abominable electricity, discovering unimagined capacities of suffering in totally unfamiliar regions of sentiency … This was commonly the work of a single tormentor; but I can also remember having been caught by a group, and tossed from one to another – seemingly for a time of many minutes.

  III

  Whence the fancy of those shapes? I do not know. Possibly from some impression of fear in earliest infancy; possibly from some experience of fear in other lives than mine. That mystery is forever insoluble. But the mystery of the shock of the touch admits of a definite hypothesis.

  First, allow me to observe that the experience of the sensation itself cannot be dismissed as ‘mere imagination’. Imagination means cerebral activity: its pains and its pleasures are alike inseparable from nervous operation, and their physical importance is sufficiently proved by their physiological effects. Dream-fear may kill as well as other fear; and no emotion thus powerful can be reasonably deemed undeserving of study.

  One remarkable fact in the problem to be considered is that the sensation of seizure in dreams differs totally from all sensations familiar to ordinary waking life. Why this differentiation? How to interpret the extraordinary massiveness and depth of the thrill?

  I have already suggested that the dreamer’s fear is most probably not a reflection of relative experience, but represents the incalculable total of ancestral experience of dream-fear. If the sum of the
experience of active life be transmitted by inheritance, so must likewise be transmitted the summed experience of the life of sleep. And in normal heredity either class of transmissions would probably remain distinct.

  Now, granting this hypothesis, the sensation of dream-seizure would have had its beginnings in the earliest phases of dream-consciousness – long prior to the apparition of man. The first creatures capable of thought and fear must often have dreamed of being caught by their natural enemies. There could not have been much imagining of pain in these primal dreams. But higher nervous development in later forms of being would have been accompanied with larger susceptibility to dream-pain. Still later, with the growth of reasoning-power, ideas of the supernatural would have changed and intensified the character of dream-fear. Furthermore, through all the course of evolution, heredity would have been accumulating the experience of such feeling. Under those forms of imaginative pain evolved through reaction of religious beliefs, there would persist some dim survival of savage primitive fears, and again, under this, a dimmer but incomparably deeper substratum of ancient animal-terrors. In the dreams of the modern child all these latencies might quicken – one below another – unfathomably – with the coming and the growing of nightmare.

  It may be doubted whether the phantasms of any particular nightmare have a history older than the brain in which they move. But the shock of the touch would seem to indicate some point of dream-contact with the total race-experience of shadowy seizure. It may be that profundities of Self – abysses never reached by any ray from the life of sun – are strangely stirred in slumber, and that out of their blackness immediately responds a shuddering of memory, measureless even by millions of years.

  Notes

  Editorial notes have been provided here to give commentary where possible on aspects of the text not already annotated by Hearn himself. The editor wishes to record his profound thanks to the distinguished scholar Mrs Yoshiko Ushioda, former curator of the Japanese Art Collection at the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, for her assistance with some of the more obscure elements in the notes.

  OF GHOSTS AND GOBLINS

  From Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1894), vol. 2, pp. 648–55.

  1. OF GHOSTS AND GOBLINS: The text here is an extract from a longer version of the story in Hearn’s Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, in which he recalls watching a fantastical magic-lantern show at a night festival with his gardener Kinjurō, which inspires Kinjurō to tell the tale that follows, starting from the second paragraph of section VI of the original text.

  2. kwan: A coffin.

  3. ‘Then the girl … you are a man!”’ […]: The following section is headed ‘VII’ in the original text.

  4. daimyō: The daimyō were the feudal lords of Japan, exercising great influence from the tenth to the mid nineteenth century, when the caste was abolished in 1871, following the Meiji Restoration in 1868.

  5. ihai: A mortuary tablet.

  6. ‘Anata!’: ‘You!’

  THE DREAM OF A SUMMER DAY

  From ‘Out of the East’: Reveries and Studies in New Japan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1895), pp. 1–27.

  1. yukata: A lightweight kimono, worn in the summer and traditionally made of indigo-dyed cotton.

  2. kuruma: A type of vehicle or cart. In Hearn’s day it was the equivalent of a rickshaw or jinrikisha (see note 1 for ‘Mujina’ below).

  3. ‘Manyefushifu’: The title is translated as ‘Collection of a Myriad Leaves’ by Basil Hall Chamberlain in The Classical Poetry of the Japanese (London: Trübner & Co., 1880), p. 9. Chamberlain dates the first bringing together of the twenty volumes that make up the original collection of poetry to the eighth century (p. 10). Translations of a selection of poems from the original work form the bulk of his volume, including a translation in verse of the ballad ‘The Fisher Boy Urashima’ (pp. 33–5), Chamberlain noting that Urashima’s tomb and various objects associated with him were still on display at a temple near Yokohama (p. 36). The story was also translated by diplomat and scholar, William George Aston.

  4. Aston: William George Aston (1841–1911), born near Derry in what is now Northern Ireland, was a British diplomat and a scholar of the language and culture of both Japan and Korea. He served as a diplomat in both countries, retiring from the diplomatic service on the grounds of ill-health in 1889. He also translated ‘The Legend of Urashima’ in his A Grammar of the Japanese Written Language (London/Yokohama: Trübner & Company/Lane, Crawford & Company, 1877), pp. xvi–xx.

  5. Chamberlain: See the Introduction, note 14, and note 3 above.

  6. Mikado Yuriaku: Yūryaku (r. AD 457–79) was the twenty-first emperor of Japan.

  7. in the second year of Tenchiyō, in the reign of the Mikado Go-Junwa: Tenchō was a Japanese era lasting from 824 to 834 and incorporating the reign of the emperor Junna (824–33). Japanese eras generally reflect the reign of emperors and years are counted by reference to an emperor’s years on the throne, hence the year in question here would be 825.

  8. kurumaya: The runner who pulled the kuruma (see note 2 above).

  9. sen: A Japanese coin worth one-hundredth of a yen, the basic currency unit.

  10. The Classical Poetry of the Japanese … in Trübner’s Oriental Series: See note 3 above.

  11. Doyō, or the Period of Greatest Heat, in the twenty-sixth year of Meiji: In the Japanese lunar calendar, the doyō is an eighteen-day time period prior to a change of seasons. Hearn is referring to the period around late July/early August when heat and humidity are at their highest in Japan. The twentieth-sixth year of the Meiji era (1868–1912) was 1894.

  12. Miō-jin: In William George Aston’s Shintō (The Way of the Gods) (London: Longmans, Green, 1905), a Miōjin-oroshi is defined as a Shintōist medium (p. 356).

  13. Romaji: Romaji or Romanji are the terms used in Latin script for the romanization of the Japanese written language.

  IN CHOLERA-TIME

  From Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1896), pp. 257–65.

  1. the late war: A reference to the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–5).

  2. ‘Chan-chan … hané!’: ‘Little boys can cut off a Chinese head!’

  3. the legend of the Sai-no-Kawara: In Japanese Buddhist mythology, the Sai no Kawara is a sandy beach where the souls of dead children do penance in the netherworld.

  4. Manyemon: Inagaki Manyemon, a veteran samurai, was the father of Inagaki Kinjūrō, who, with his wife, Tomi, adopted Hearn’s wife, Setsu, as an infant and brought her up under the fosterage then still common in Japan. Setsu remained with the Inagaki household until she began living with Hearn (see Yoji Hasegawa (ed.), A Walk in Kumamoto: The Life and Times of Setsu Koizumi, Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese Wife (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 1997), pp. 50–51).

  5. the twenty-eighth year of Meiji: The twenty-eighth year of the Meiji era was 1896.

  6. Bosatsu: The Sanskrit bodhisattva, somebody who helps others to achieve enlightenment, is rendered bosatsu in Japanese.

  7. amé syrup: Amé is a contraction of mizuamé, a Japanese sweetener with a taste similar to honey and used in the making of sweets.

  NINGYŌ-NO-HAKA

  From Gleanings in Buddha-Fields: Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1897), pp. 124–31.

  1. kakémono: A Japanese scroll painting or piece of calligraphy.

  2. ‘Aa fushigi … komatta ne?’: A way of showing sympathy in response to being told about a distressing situation when one can’t think of what else to say.

  THE ETERNAL HAUNTER

  From Exotics and Retrospectives (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1898), pp. 293–99.

  1. ‘Chikanobu’: Toyohara (‘Yōshū’) Chikanobu (1838–1912) was one of the outstanding Japanese woodblock artists of the Meiji era.

  2. Psyche: A reference to the classical Greek tale of the love between Psyche and Cupid, culminating, after various obstacles have bee
n overcome, in their marriage. Psyche is also the Greek term for ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’.

  3. the World-Tree, Yggdrasil: Yggdrasil is the tree of life in Norse mythology, containing and connecting all the nine worlds of this belief system.

  4. Echo: Echo in Greek mythology was a mountain nymph who incurred the jealousy of Zeus’s wife, Hera, who restricted her speech to the last words spoken to her. Unable to tell Narcissus of her feelings for him, Echo had to watch him fall in love with his own reflection and waste away.

  FRAGMENT

  From In Ghostly Japan (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1899), pp. 3–7.

  A PASSIONAL KARMA

  From In Ghostly Japan, pp. 73–113.

  1. Kikugorō: Onoe Kikugorō V (1844–1903) was a celebrated Kabuki actor of the Meiji era.

  2. the Botan-Dōrō, or ‘Peony-Lantern’: Botan Dōrō, translated as ‘The Peony-Lantern’, was a Japanese ghost story derived from a Chinese original. Hearn’s story is based on a version performed in the Kabuki theatre in Tokyo by Kikugorō and his company in 1892.

  3. Enchō: Botan Dōrō was adapted in 1884 by Enchō Sanyūtei (1839–1900) into a raguko (literally, ‘fallen words’), an entertainment performed by a lone storyteller.

  4. O-Tsuyu: ‘O’ is an honorific prefix that can be applied to Japanese nouns, adjectives and verbs.

  5. Sama: A respectful honorific suffix attached to the end of a name.

  6. Kwannon: The Japanese goddess of mercy.