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

by Drazen, Patrick

  The Eerie Queerie series ran long enough to be printed in four paperback volumes, but Shiozu got sidetracked; in the middle of the story he was commissioned to create a manga for Dear T, which he described as “the main publication for boys’ love series.”

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  In the manga/anime Yuyu Hakusho, the teen punk named Yusuke finds out that he has died from a cute young girl in traditional kimono, riding the oar of a boat. Her name is Botan, which in this case is a loaded name. Botan is a popular brand of Japanese rice, as well as a popular brand of candy. But botan (Japanese for peony) calls up its most supernatural association with another of the classic ghost stories: the Kaidan Botan Doro (Ghost Story of the Peony Lantern).

  76. The Peony Lantern

  This particular tale came over in the early 1600s from China, in a series of stories that were Buddhist morality lessons told as ghost tales, like the Ugetsu Monogatari. In 1666 Asai Ryoi adapted this story, among others, into a collection titled Otogi Boki (Hand Puppets), changing the Chinese locales to Japanese ones. The story took on new life in 1884 when it was adapted into a rakugo, a kind of stylized monologue. In 1892 Kaidan Botan Doro was further adapted as a kabuki play, and a prose version of the stage version appears in Lafcadio Hearn’s In Ghostly Japan. The story’s also been adapted to the modern stage; the kabuki version’s been filmed.

  In the original, the story begins appropriately on the first night of Obon. Appropriately, since this is a love story between the living and the dead. A samurai widower named Shinnojo Ogiwara sees two figures walking down the road in front of his home. As they draw closer, he sees that they are a woman with a servant-girl who’s holding a peony lantern. The lady is quite beautiful, so he stops them and engages in conversation. After learning that the lady’s name is O-Tsuyu (which has been Romanized several different ways), they vow eternal love. For the next few evenings, the woman and her servant come to the home of the samurai at dusk, always leaving before dawn. An elderly neighbor, however, becomes suspicious, looks in on the samurai one night, and sees him in bed embracing a skeleton. In the morning he tells Ogiwara about his beloved; the shaken samurai consults a Buddhist priest, who tells him to place a protective charm around his house to keep the ghost away. The charm prevents O-Tsuyu from entering his house that night, so she calls to the samurai to come out; unable to resist, he leaves the house to go to her place. “Her place” is a newly-dug grave on the grounds of a temple, but he doesn’t care. In the morning, Ogiwara’s body is found in the grave embracing a skeleton.

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  77. Let’s Spend the Night Together

  The resident ghosts of Saito High School, in the Haunted Junction anime series, are usually more than a handful for the Holy Student Council: three teen clerics (a Buddhist monk, a Shinto miko, and a Christian exorcist) who are generally excused from the more mundane aspects of high school. The haunted high school, however, attracts other ghosts, with some posing bigger challenges than others.

  Episode 3, “Love to the point of possession”, begins with a pretty young girl uttering her “final prayer.” We meet the girl in the next scene, when Ryudo the Buddhist student monk and Haruto the Christian student exorcist meet her outside the school gate. The girl asks the monk to lend her his body. No, not like that.

  In life, she was a waitress at a coffee-house where she met Toshi, a musician with an up-and-coming group. She said it was “love at first sight,” but they hadn’t even had a month together when she was killed in a traffic accident. She wanted to see Toshi again, but he couldn’t see her, unless she inhabited a living body. She was a ghost with unfinished business, since Toshi had asked her to spend a night with him before she died.

  This put things in a different light for Ryudo; he wasn’t about to let her inhabit his body so that another guy could have sex with it. He was just too much of a skirt-chaser, especially of the school’s Toilet Hanako ghost. Mutsuki, the miko on the Holy Student Council, gets into a spiritual battle royal with Ryudo, trying to force him to let the girl possess him, but the girl calls a halt, not wanting such a bother for her sake and apologizing for not realizing Ryudo’s feelings. After she leaves, the principal (a ghost himself) reveals that her spirit is now too weak to sustain itself past midnight, so the girl (whose name, we finally learn, is also Hanako) has one chance left at her unfinished business.

  We also learn another reason why Hanako couldn’t approach Toshi: some of his other fans were complaining that Toshi had stopped singing since Hanako died. She also explains what a night together would involve; no, not that. Toshi had written a song for her, and called Hanako to ask if he could spend an entire night singing his song to her, an audience of one. However, she died the next day.

  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 F3 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 21st 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.