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

by Drazen, Patrick

  Describing Sugiura’s manga as “Edo-style” is an understatement. Her work deliberately drew on the influence of the masterpieces of ukiyo-e woodprints. Sugiura herself, the daughter of kimono makers, usually wore kimono, and in other ways avoided the trappings of modern life. Don’t look for the large eyes of manga; these eyes are classical slits.

  Ghost Hunt

  Fuyumi Ono’s Akuryou (Evil Spirits) novels, written for young readers, draw on the hyaku monogatari as well in their manga incarnation (with artwork by Shiho Inada) and published and animated in Japanese and English as Ghost Hunt. In the beginning of the first episode, Mai Taniyama and her fellow high school students are telling ghost stories, not with candles, but with flashlights. The payoff is the same: they turn out the light, then they count off, with the possibility (maybe the hope) that a ghost will have joined the group. One extra person does appear… but more on that in other chapters.

  Kaidan Hyaku Monogatari

  In 2002 Japan’s Fuji TV network broadcast an 11-week TV series, Kaidan Hyaku Monogatari (One Hundred Ghost Stories). These were retellings of classic ghost stories, with the added kick of CGI (computer generated imaging) taking the special effects to a new level. These stories include the tale of Oiwa and her faithless samurai husband, the yukionna (snow woman), “Earless” Hoichi, Princess Kaguya, and the haunting of “Shining Prince” Genji, among others, all of whom can be found in these pages.

  There’s even a musical version of the game. The Kaidan Suite is described as a musical interpretation of hyaku monogatari, and seeks to recreate the mood of an Edo-era evening in which ghost stories were told by candlelight. While drawing from traditional Japanese musical systems and narration, the Kaidan Suite also borrows from 20th-century classical and jazz improvisation to capture the emotional pacing of hyaku monogatari. As in many traditional Japanese ghost stories, feminism is a distinct subtext of the suite; numerous examples are concerned with injustices against women.

  Kousetsu Hyaku Monogatari

  In 2003 the anime production company Geneon (formerly Pioneer) produced a 13-episode OAV series which became available in English translation in 2004. Variously titled Requiem of the Darkness and Requiem from the Darkness (both titles appeared on Geneon’s own website), neither is an accurate translation of the original title: Kousetsu Hyaku Monogatari (Rumor of the Hundred Stories). This series is about the act of collecting and writing ghost stories; at least, that’s how it starts.

  Natsuhiko Kyougoku, principal writer for the series, is a Japanese Renaissance man, having written novels and motion pictures as well as launched a quarterly supernatural-themed magazine, Mystery. He collaborated for this series with two other writers of Japanese horror films, Hiroshi Takahashi (creator of the internationally famous film Ringu) and Yoshinobu Fujioka (who worked on one of the Tomie horror films based on a manga by Junji Ito), as well as Satoshi Kon collaborator Sadayuki Murai. The series is directed by Hideki Tonokatsu, who also directed a special in the Lupin the Third anime series.

  Kousetsu Hyaku Monogatari is set in the mid-1800s, as the Edo period is coming to an end. An earnest young would-be writer, Momosuke, travels around Japan, soliciting ghost stories for his first work, a Hyaku Monogatari. In his travels, though, he meets three strange companions. The leader of the trio, Mataichi, is a short man who dresses as a Buddhist priest but professes to have no beliefs at all; he will do whatever he’s hired to do. Nagamimi, in contrast, is a huge man, although he defers to Mataichi’s leadership. They’re accompanied by Ogin, a voluptuous young woman who carries a puppet.

  The artwork is singular, in that it barely resembles what fans in the west have come to think of as anime. There is very little following of Japanese stylistic conventions, especially in drawings of characters’ eyes, and backgrounds and people alike are rendered almost abstractly. If anything, this animation reminds the viewer of western “graphic novels” of the Dark Knight variety. The art lacks a distinctly Japanese quality, which has to be compensated for by the storytelling. But here, too, things don’t quite measure up. There are plenty of scary events, to be sure, and it would seem that Momosuke is finding the material for his ghost stories. However, the stories don’t involve ghosts at all. There are plenty of creepy and depraved events, from robbery to cannibalism, but no actual supernatural events.

  Until the final episodes. The eleventh story introduces a gimmick: a Weapon of Mass Destruction called a flame lance. According to the story, it was a kind of cannon given to a small island by the Heike clan, to be used in its battle against the Taira (see chapter 9). However, with the war over for centuries, the cannon exists only to be activated for the sake of general destruction. This happens in the last two episodes when a depraved nobleman finds inspiration in ancient drawings of demonic torture to use the weapon.

  In the end, Momosuke tells the viewer that his Hyaku Monogatari were completed and published, although perhaps we are meant to wonder if his fictional ghosts could ever compare with the monstrosities of real life.

  xxxHOLIC[15]

  Early in this manga by the CLAMP collective, which started publication in 2003 and ran until 2010, and its fairly faithful anime incarnation, the four principal characters gather on a summer night for a “hyaku monogatari” session. The pivotal character, Yuko Ichihara (which isn’t her real name), is a mysterious woman, something of a witch, who employs a high school student in her curious shop. The student, Kimihiro Watanuki, sees dead people, like most of his family. He wants to be rid of this family trait, however, and asks Yuko for help. She’ll help him—for a price. Because he can’t pay the price, she puts him to work in her shop until he’s earned enough to pay for her help; until then, he still sees dead people and other spirits.

  Life isn’t all work and spirits; Watanuki is interested in a girl in his high school class, Himawari, who keeps her distance as if she’s afraid of bad luck befalling Watanuki. There’s also the school’s top athlete, Domeki, who Watanuki sees as a rival for Himawari’s attentions (even if Domeki doesn’t see himself that way).

  In volume 2 of the manga, the four gather at the Shinto temple run by Domeki’s family for a ghost story session one hot summer night. The number of tales is shortened to four stories from each of the four participants, but things still get out of hand before they reach the end. Spirits begin to gather outside the room, threatening to break in through the paper screen walls; they’re drawn to the room next door in the temple by the presence there of a parishioner’s corpse awaiting his funeral. Domeki has a bow but no arrows; still, this is enough to keep the spirits at bay.

  That’s more like it. Unlike the Kousetsu Hyaku Monogatari, this time the ghosts are real, and threaten to break through from their realm to that of the humans. This is part of the attraction of ghost stories: the lingering thought in the back of the mind, “But what if it’s true?” Besides, as CLAMP artist Satsuki Igarashi points out, “Just because you can’t prove something doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

  xxx

  Sidebar: Shi

  Once the quartet has arrived for the telling of ghost stories, Yuko suggests that things be shortened: each of the four people should tell four stories. This doesn’t exactly make things better, and the problem is in the number four.

  There are two ways of counting in Japanese, one of which is borrowed from the Chinese. In both countries, using this system causes problems when one gets to four. Ichi, ni, san; they’re fine. Then comes shi—which happens to sound like the Chinese and Japanese word for “death.”

  Does it make a difference? According to one study conducted in 2002 at the University of California La Jolla, cardiac deaths for Chinese and Japanese Americans spike 7 percent on the fourth of each month.[16] In addition, some Japanese buildings (especially hospitals) refuse to list their fourth floor, as some American buildings don’t mention having a thirteenth floor. The room numbers also leave off the numeral four, as a way of avoiding an omen of bad luck.

  Like many superstitions, this one is
n’t easy to change. Another sound (yon) has been given to the number four, but yon has yet to replace shi.

  xxx

  Even ghosts aren’t immune to this belief, as illustrated by this encounter from the series Gakkou no Kaidan.[17]

  17. Dead Air

  Both the old and new schools in the village of Miyanoshita are equipped with radio studios. Students with an aptitude for broadcasting can get some in-house experience with announcements, music, and interviews. Unfortunately, they also gain experience dealing with malevolent spirits. Back in the day, Satsuki and Keiichiro’s mother had trapped one spirit in the broadcast booth of the old school. Unfortunately, it’s gotten loose and invaded the new school.

  Satsuki finds herself locked in the broadcast booth with the ghost one night. Until now, she’s has a diary written by her mother detailing how all of the various spirits were subdued. This time, the book is outside the booth; she’ll have to figure it out on her own.

  She figures it out when the ghost starts counting down her last thirty seconds. However, the spirit skips the numbers twenty-four and fourteen. This tells Satsuki the ghost itself is superstitious, and she yells “Four! Four!” again and again until the final second has passed without the ghost getting to zero, and it vanishes.

  CHAPTER 7: CEMETERIES IN JAPAN

  Shaman King hero Yoh Asakura has grown up seeing spirits all of his life, and thinks nothing of loafing around in cemeteries and goofing off with the ghosts. However, his second battle for the position of Shaman King takes place in what the manga calls “Chokohama Foreigners Cemetery”. There is, of course, a major difference between Japanese and non-Japanese burial grounds: corpses. In Japan the tombstone serves as a channel of communication with the deceased. A person’s cremated ashes may rest beneath the stone, or there may be no trace of a person at all. Anyone bringing offerings of flowers or food or drink or personal effects knows that the living will benefit from these gifts rather than the dead. (In Satoshi Kon’s anime feature Tokyo Godfathers, the three homeless heroes who find an infant abandoned in a dumpster also find an offering of disposable diapers in a cemetery.) Even if the deceased’s ashes are buried there, the spirit in the other world is what’s important.

  The Judeo-Christian tradition, by comparison, venerates the body of the deceased and inters it, either as it was in life or in as close to lifelike as mortuary science can get. The dominant myth in the Judeo-Christian religion involves the resurrection of the physical body after death. To the Japanese, this way of doing things, keeping corpses nearby and ready to walk again, is creepy.

  Chokohama Foreigners Cemetery is a rather obvious stand-in for Yokohama’s Foreign General Cemetery. The similar name is the first clue; the second is the information that the cemetery was founded when Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in Japan in 1853 on orders from President Millard Fillmore. (The mission was to keep an eye on the British, with whom America had an uneasy truce after the War of 1812 and who established a major foothold in China after the Opium War of 1839.) When one of Perry’s sailors died in 1854, he was entombed on the grounds of the Zotokuin Temple. While one of Perry’s company is indeed buried at Zotokuin, this isn’t the only version of the cemetery’s founding. Two Russian sailors died in Yokohama in 1859, according to another account, and were buried there.

  One of the more important foreigners buried there was Charles Richardson, a British merchant based in Shanghai. In 1862 Richardson was part of a group of foreigners who were traveling through Japan. In the village of Namamugi, which was long ago absorbed into Yokohama, the entourage of the father of the Daimyo of Satsuma, including a thousand soldiers, came down the road. The foreigners were ordered to dismount to show respect; Richardson refused, for reasons that are not clear, although Richardson was quoted as saying “I know how to deal with these people.” Samurai, who by Japanese law could kill with impunity, attacked the foreigners, killing Richardson and two other men. This led to a brief but costly bombardment of the village by the British Navy in 1863 and the payment of reparations to Britain. Ironically, within a few years, the Tokugawa shogunate would end, and the Meiji period would begin its emphasis on catching up to the west in all respects.

  The third clue, that about 4,500 foreigners are buried in Chokohama, establishes the cemetery as Yokohama, which has a similar number of graves.

  Yokohama’s is merely the most famous foreigner cemetery in Japan. There are others: in Hakodate, on the northern island of Hokkaido, where another one of Perry’s crew is buried; the Aoyama cemetery in Tokyo, where some of the more illustrious dead are westerners brought to Japan during the Meiji era to give the nation a technological upgrade after 250 years of isolation; and the port cities of Kobe and Nagasaki. Nagasaki is home for the earliest known burial of a westerner: an official of the Dutch East India Company, Hendrik Duurkoop, who was buried in 1778 in a cemetery where foreigners were already being buried. That cemetery was on the grounds of the Goshinji Buddhist temple overlooking the harbor.

  xxx

  Christianity itself came to Japan in the mid 1500s, and the few Christian churches tended to be built in the southern part of Japan, where ships from Christian nations traded. Nagasaki is heavily populated with churches (compared to the rest of Japan), and this included the largest Catholic cathedral in Asia at the time: the Urakami Cathedral. The cathedral, and the convent of nuns attached to it, happened to be at Ground Zero on August 9, 1945, when the second atomic bomb of World War II went off.

  Manga and anime set in Nagasaki often show Christian churches; examples range from the Nagasaki story in the dating sim-inspired series Sentimental Journey to Yoko Matsushita’s Yami no Matsuei manga/anime about psychic investigators who happen to be ghosts themselves (more about them in the “Ghostbusters” chapter). A Christmas special in the Ghost Hunt manga (art by Shiho Inada, based on a series of young adult novels by Fuyumi Ono) takes place in a Christian church in southern Japan. While it may not have what the west would call a happy ending, the mystery is solved and a ghost is granted peace.

  18. “Daddy will find me.”

  The members of Shibuya Psychic Research are offered a job at a Catholic church; Father Toujo knows the group’s Australian exorcist, John Brown, and has contacted him about strange happenings at the church, including spiritual possessions. In this case, the possessed ones are children: Father Toujo has a day-care and orphanage at the church, and cares for children of various nationalities and races. The strange activity started thirty years before, as the church was being built, and Father Toujo and the children were preparing to move out of their old church. All things considered, the old priest seems rather blasé about it all, comparing the spirit possession to a game of hide-and-seek. The possessed children take on other personalities, then forget what happened when they return to themselves.

  At the time the paranormal activity started, it seemed to focus on a child named Kenji Nagano. His father brought him to the church at age five, at which time the boy had stopped talking, and tapped with a stick to answer questions. (Although the manga never uses the word “autism” in describing Kenji, it suggests that this may have been part of his problem; for whatever reason, Kenji’s father abandoned the boy at the orphanage.) One day the children were playing hide-and-seek at the church under construction; Kenji was never found. His spirit has persisted at the church, possessing other children more and more often.

  While the group is there Kenji first possesses a young boy, then Mai Taniyama, the heroine of the series. The possessed Mai acts as if boss “Naru” Shibuya’s Chinese assistant Rin is her father. When Rin gets upset and yells at Mai, she runs away; her disappearance is followed by the ghostly tapping Kenji would use to signal that he was ready to play hide-and-seek. After an exhaustive search, the former Buddhist monk, Houshou Takigawa, realizes that the children searching for Mai never look above eye-level. Sure enough, on the church grounds they find Kenji/Mai hiding up in a tree. However, finding her doesn’t free Kenji’s spirit. That happens when Naru go
es back into the church and looks up at the angelic statues, set in alcoves high up on the walls. One of the angels seems to have one foot resting on a skull, but then the searchers realize: that skull wasn’t part of the sculpture. Thirty years before, while playing hide and seek, Kenji had climbed construction scaffolding and hidden behind the statue of the angel; while he was up there, the scaffolding collapsed, trapping the unspeaking boy behind the statue, where he died. When construction was completed on the church, nobody thought to investigate the sculpture; but, when Naru and company realize the truth of the matter, Mai tells Naru, in Kenji’s voice, “Thank you” before the boy’s spirit leaves Mai’s body.

  This ghost wasn’t especially malicious; Mai remembered that he “seemed pretty happy”. Not all Japanese ghosts are threatening; sometimes they’re just out of their place, like Kenji and the girl under the hydrangea, and may need some help getting home.

  CHAPTER 8: SUICIDE

  Of all of the different beliefs between east and west, perhaps the greatest difference is in the attitude toward taking one’s own life. In the Judeo-Christian west, suicide is never considered an acceptable option. In the second scene of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the title character, upset nearly to suicide by the sudden death of his father and his mother’s hasty marriage to her dead husband’s brother, wishes that “the everlasting had not fixed/His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter.” (I, ii, 131-132) Put simply, the Old Testament commandment “Thou shalt not kill” has been interpreted as rejecting suicide as well as murder: Thou shalt not kill oneself.

  Since the Bible didn’t get to Japan until the 1500s, there simply is no history of specifically religious injunctions against suicide. Buddhism, with its belief in the rebirth of the soul after death, generally doesn’t share the Judeo-Christian rejection of suicide. It’s still not a common means of ending one’s life, but is common enough: Japan, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), has the ninth highest suicide rate in the world—more than 30,000 per year.[18]