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

by Drazen, Patrick

  This episode of Gakkou no Kaidan is a capsule version of the Unico movie: a castaway doll treats people callously, but is redeemed by a single act of kindness. Karma, after all, goes both ways. Good deeds live on, as do bad deeds.

  95. The Ghost of Moga-chan

  This story isn’t about a traditional Japanese doll or a western baby-doll. The name Moga-chan is a brand name, a contraction of “modern gal”; it was Japan’s answer to the Barbie doll. In the GS Mikami manga episode titled “Noroi no Ningyouteikoku” (Curse of the Doll Empire), we get a look at a ghost-doll that touches Mikami personally.

  Returning to the office from an assignment, Mikami and company see a child waiting outside the office. The little girl, Aya-chan, says that her Moga-chan doll is missing; it was taken by a large and scary-looking doll. Mikami, who never works for nothing, still didn’t want to just turn the girl down; however, forecasting the future, she’s warned that she’ll have bad luck if she accepts any money at all for this assignment. The cosmos wants this job to be a freebie.

  In Aya-chan’s room Mikami discovers a portal to another dimension; she, Okinu-chan, and Yokoshima pass through to discover an army of Moga-chan dolls, led by a doll who asks, “Aren’t you Reiko Mikami? It’s been a long time.” The doll then takes off its clothes to reveal the name Reiko Mikami written on its back; the doll was once Mikami’s! The doll goes on to say that humans will soon kill each other off, and dolls will survive to play with them. They attack the humans, who defend themselves but cannot stop the dolls, which cannot die. Mikami wishes that she’d gotten at least a token payment from Aya-chan’s mother. At this, the Moga-chan that used to belong to Aya-chan grabs the doll possessed by part of Mikami’s soul; Mikami then can easily capture the soul in an ofuda. As Aya-chan’s doll dies, her last words are to tell Aya-chan “I love you.”

  Again, this story plays out like the Unico story mentioned above. Dolls are mirrors, reflections of the best and worst in people.

  96. “Stalker”

  The most modern doll in the ghost realm is also one of the smallest and least likely to offend: a strap doll that’s meant to decorate a cell phone. One of these dolls is featured in a 2004 episode of Yoshiyuki Nishi’s manga Muyo & Roji.

  The two youthful psychic “attorneys” are visited by Kaya Onodera, who has been having haunted-house problems for the past six months. Doors open and close by themselves, curtains rustle when there’s no breeze, objects start flying around; it gets worse whenever she has company. These things started happening after she got the strap doll (although she doesn’t recall how she got it), but its appearance coincided with the accidental death of a classmate. The boy, Nobuo, was regarded as creepy and dismissed as a stalker, shunned and beaten. He had, for example, numerous photos of Kaya on his cell phone. Kaya made a couple of friendly overtures to Nobuo before his death.

  Muyo realizes that the strap doll once belonged to Nobuo and was stalking Kaya, as its owner had once obsessed over her in life: “spirits hang around in objects to protect those they love and can’t forget,” Muyo says, but Nobuo’s spirit didn’t understand Kaya’s feelings. Muyo declares that Kaya’s feelings are at best conflicted: “She put on a gentle face, but her heart said, ‘stalker.’” While both were set to be punished by a railroad trip through Hell for eternity, Nobuo throws Kaya from the train, saying that he merely wanted to be her friend. A tearful Kaya hopes that this can happen someday if they are both born again. This was all that was necessary to break the curse: Nobuo got the chance to state how he honestly felt, which still isn’t easy in Japanese culture, as the train takes Nobuo to the River Sanzu. The story ends on the following Obon, when Kaya has a picture taken (she’s wearing a floral yukata) with the ghost of Nobuo, who, like so many ghosts, returns to the world for Obon.

  CHAPTER 29: A FEW WORDS ABOUT VAMPIRES

  Vampires have appeared in Japanese pop culture for decades. Osamu Tezuka created a comic 26 episode series about Count Dracula being transplanted—castle and all—to Japan, with his prepubescent daughter Chocula(!), published in Shonen Champion manga magazine in the 1970s. He was inspired by the Hollywood vampire parody Love at First Bite, which was shown in Japan as Dracula Miyako e Iku (Dracula Goes to Town); the pun works in both English and Japanese.

  A few years after Don Dracula came Tokimeki Tonight, a romantic comedy manga by Koi Ikeno. It started appearing in Ribon Mascot magazine in 1982 and ran until 1994. It’s the story of Ranze Eto, a chipper teenaged girl with more than a few problems getting between her and her crush on classmate Shun Makabe; those problems include her father the vampire and her mother the werewolf.

  Mamoru Oshii’s Production I.G. studio in 1999 created a gory anime special, which ran just under fifty minutes and was supposed to be part of a trilogy. Instead, it reached the status of instant classic: Blood the Last Vampire. Set in 1966 at Yokota Air Base in Japan, this film used the birth and spread of vampires in Asia as a metaphor for America’s war in Vietnam. In this case, the vampires were not truly human except in their ability to pose as humans; they were actually monsters called chiropterans, who could only be dispatched by Saya, a schoolgirl wielding a samurai sword, a girl who was set apart from the rest of the population by being an “Original” (a category which is never explained). The film later begat a 51-episode TV anime series, Blood +, and in 2009 a live action version of Blood the Last Vampire appeared, directed by Chris Nahon, trying to expand Saya’s backstory.

  The sheer number of shojo manga based on vampire stories, especially recently in the Twilight era, is impressive, from Millennium Snow (a comedy-romance between a dying girl who seeks to live and the vampire who can oblige her) to Chibi Vampire (a comedy about a little girl vampire who suffers from having too much blood) to Vampire Knights (a high school divided into day and night classes, and guess who’s in the night group).

  These stories, and many others, draw in part on the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker, and the various Hollywood films based on the novel, but feature a distinctly Japanese take on the proceedings. In the Buddhist context, the vampire’s search for eternal life is somewhat superfluous, since the soul is in a cycle of death and rebirth anyway. Preserving the same soul and the same body, however, is unnatural, and the vampire who kills others to selfishly prolong his or her own life is a monster.

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  La Portrait de Petite Cossette

  This 3-part OAV begins by directly referencing the “In a Cup of Tea” story in Hearn’s Kwaidan. A teenaged painter, Eiri Kurahashi, works in an antique store, where he finds a Venetian wineglass. Within it is the spirit of a girl, Cossette d’Auvergne, with whom Eiri has fallen in love. Cossette is a blond-haired blue-eyed doll-like beauty with an unusual request. She tells Eiri that she cannot be reborn unless someone loves her enough to give up their life for her sake. In time Eiri sees other things in the wineglass, including Cossette being murdered by a man even as she declares that she loves him.

  Directed in 2004 by Akiyuki Shinbo, written by Mayori Sekijima, and based on a manga by Asuka Katsura, La Portrait de Petite Cossette has a twist on the Hearn story by making this ghost undeniably foreign, even down to the overly French name, Cossette of the Auvergne. The Auvergne region in central France is known for cheeses, Michelin tires, and mineral water. However, the name was chosen deliberately by Katsura, I think, because of a more modern association. Cossette lived in the Auvergne in the 1700s, as did Lestat de Lioncourt, the vampire protagonist of the popular series of books by Anne Rice.

  Xenophobia—the fear of the outsider, the Other—isn’t the private property of any country, and Japan has had its share over the years. There was the Tokugawa period, when Japan closed itself off from the world for two centuries. There is a long history of Japan disrespecting its neighbors in Korea and China, in forums ranging from textbooks to newspapers to manga.[108] The Ghost Hunt manga has Naru assisted by a tall, bishonen-looking young man named Lin or Rin; born in Hong Kong, at one point he tells Mai that he dislikes the Japanese because o
f the way they’ve treated Chinese in the past. Americans, often black Americans, have come in for the same disrespect, although the pendulum has also swung the other way in recent years, with Japanese pop bands adopting the clothes, slang, and mannerisms of hip-hop.

  When it comes to western women, though, there seems to be a love-hate relationship. The blond-haired blue eyed ideal represented by Cossette has been a Hollywood staple for generations, and it’s not surprising that it should have influenced the Japanese culture when a large part of that culture includes American media, whether magazines or movies, pop stars or politicians. The blonde baby-doll ideal has been attractive in Japan (as we’ve seen in the previous chapter on dolls), yet has also served in some anime/manga as a way of denoting the villain.

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  The “Bloodstained Labyrinth” case of the Ghost Hunt manga features a bizarre old house haunted by a ghostly vampire, who’s actually a composite of two historic European “vampires.”

  97. “I don’t want to die”

  Shibuya Psychic Research becomes part of a group of psychics investigating the haunting of an old western-style mansion at the request of no less than the Prime Minister of Japan. Four people have disappeared near the house recently, and no trace of them was ever found; similar disappearances have happened since the mansion’s construction began in 1877. The mansion’s owner, Kaneyuki Miyama, made a fortune in the 1800s in silk and then became a philanthropist, even opening his own charity hospital; however, other, darker rumors circulated around him when he was alive; he was reported to have died in 1910, but lived as a recluse in failing health long before that. Despite the high-powered psychic investigators, the business is being kept low-key lest the media find out what’s been going on, and Naru goes so far as to assume an alias and let Yasuhara-san, who assisted in the investigation of Ryokuryo High School (see “I am not a dog”), pose as the head of Shibuya Psychic Research. One thing Mai and her female colleagues agree on: the mansion faintly yet definitely smells of blood.[109]

  In the course of their investigations, three of the visiting psychics disappear, and they have one thing in common: they’re young adults. Since Mai, Naru and the SPR group is between ages fifteen and thirty, they’re also at considerable risk. Mai dreams at one point that she is kidnapped, taken by two men to a room buried in the heart of the old house, and bled to death. Masako is likewise spirited away, and, in a trance, Mai finds her and tries to protect her until the others arrive.

  Masako narrowly misses being killed by the ghost of the previous owner of the house. Old documents refer to him under what seems to be the nickname “Urado”, but during a séance which contacts one of the disappeared psychics, the name is spelled out on the mansion’s walls in blood (along with phrases like “Help,” “It hurts,” “I’m afraid,” and “I don’t want to die”) as “Vurado.” Because of the nature of the Japanese alphabet, this is as close as the language gets to the name of Prince Vlad, the historical model for Dracula.

  Sidebar: The real Dracula

  The historical Dracula was a nobleman, and lived in the part of Romania known then and now as Transylvania (“Beyond the Forest”). Beyond that, there’s much that’s troubling but little vampiric about Dracula.

  He was born about the year 1431, one of two sons of a nobleman who was awarded the Order of the Dragon, an honor from the King in recognition of the father’s actions during the Crusades. The father highlighted the award by calling himself Dracul (“Dragon”). His son took the name “Dracula,” meaning “Son of Dracul.”

  Prince Vlad, however, earned another name before his death in 1476: Vled Tepes (“Vlad the Impaler”). He was known to mount the bodies, or body parts, of anyone who displeased him on the tops of long poles, letting the flesh rot as a warning to the citizens: behave. By most accounts, the citizens did. It was said that one town had a well with a goblet of solid gold for anyone to drink from; the people knew what would happen if the goblet were stolen.

  According to another famous story, Dracula met with a delegation from Turkey that refused for religious reasons to uncover their heads. Vlad declared that he would strengthen the religious beliefs of the delegation—and had their hats nailed to their heads.

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  In this story, however, Vlad is conflated with another historical “vampire,” the Countess Erzsebeth (or Elizabeth) Bathory (1560-1614). The owner of the story’s mansion in the 1800s, Kaneyuki Miyama, tried to cultivate a reputation as a philanthropist, but had a much darker side. His health was always feeble and, when he started to decline, he apparently adopted the “cure” of Countess Bathory, who reputedly kept herself young and beautiful by bathing in the blood of between eighty and six hundred young women. Urado would similarly kidnap young servant-girls, among others, some of whom worked in the charity hospital he established, or patients. He and his two attendants would bleed them to death, then cremate the bodies and keep the bones in a storeroom, well organized and almost respectfully treated; the blood was destined for Urado’s bathtub. Ironically, these victims were not haunting the house, because their remains had been properly treated. Those who were killed later, whose bodies had simply been dumped in haste in a spare room, like the missing psychic contacted by Misato, could still be reached by a medium.

  The bloodletting continued even after the old man died; his ghost and the ghosts of his two assistants saw to that. As Naru points out, Miyama wanted to survive; he lacked the regret and sorrow toward this world that drives other ghosts. “They’re no longer just spirits of the departed; they’re now monsters.” Some ghosts keep their integrity in Japanese lore, such as Fujiwara no Sai in Hikaru no Go, who survived a thousand years of haunting without turning into a monster.

  After Urado’s spirit was temporarily suppressed by a Daoist spell cast by Rin (who nobody knew at this point was anything but an assistant to Naru), they realized the only way to solve the problem was to burn the house to the ground. Urado didn’t dare leave the house when he was alive; it was a maze that kept him safe and contained his victims; in the end, the house that sheltered him would also be his trap.

  CHAPTER 30: IN A HAUNTED HOUSE

  We’ve already seen examples of a haunted house; in the movie Kwaidan, the first story featured a man returning to his traditional house, which is rundown and full of foreboding shadows. It turns out to be as haunted as it looks.

  The Ghost Hunt account of Urado provides a western-style haunted house, although, with its endless revisions and additions and pointless remodeling, with windows looking at nothing and stairs climbing nowhere, it might make more sense to look back to a word used in Shirley Jackson’s classic novel The Haunting of Hill House. In that book, Hill House is described as “deranged.” The house itself was disordered, sick.

  The creators of Ghost Hunt drop one hint about their own sick house in the “Bloodstained Labyrinth” story, which takes up tankobon volumes 6 and 7 of the manga. It takes a while for blueprints of the house to turn up, but, when they’re examined, it turns out that the mansion has 106 rooms. However, there has to be at least one room not on the blueprints where the ghostly outrages take place, plus a way to access the hidden room. In short, the house actually has 108 rooms, and 108 is a magically loaded number in Japan. (see Anime Explosion)

  When Takashi Shimizu, writer and director of Ju-On, said that “In old Japanese houses, even during the day, it is dark deeper inside,” he didn’t just mean the architecture. He also meant the ever-present reminders of death within life, reminders which Shimizu considers uniquely Japanese. These can include the Buddhist altar and/or Shinto shrine in the home, ancestral poems on the walls next to teacups, portraits of departed ancestors. Certainly the annual Obon festival is itself a reminder of the departed members of the family.

  Ironically, Shimizu’s definition of an “old” Japanese house is one built after World War II. In his film Ju-On (remade in the west as The Grudge), the house itself is modern concrete and wood, and perfectly mundane, but has more than its sha
re of weirdly lit corners and closets, where anything can be lurking at any time. (In the Ghost Hunt manga, one character comments that it’s possible to create a scary moment just by leaving the door to a storage closet slightly ajar.)

  Volume 3 of Lagoon Engine by Yukiru Sugisaki is an account of a case in which the Ragun brothers have to deal with a haunted house. There are definitely surprises along the way, as well as scares.

  98. A child’s feelings

  The volume begins with a statement that makes sense only at the end: that “a child’s feelings can only be fully understood by other children.” We’ve seen this already in stories involving the ghosts of children: the Ghost Talker’s Daydreams OAV, volume 2 of the Ghost Hunt manga, and others. In this case the two tween-age Ragun brothers are put in charge of investigating a haunted house.

  Mr. Kanuma approaches the boys’ father, Hideaki Ragun, who was reported to be one of the best at getting rid of the spirits haunting his house. Mister Ragun says that he trusts the judgment of his sons, who have been trained in the family business since infancy. Mister Kanuma explains that his family had built a new house and was trying to sell their western-style mansion. However, any realtor who tries to show the house gets injured, either by losing their footing or by having something fall on them. Only Mister Kanuma can enter and leave the house safely.

  On their first day in the house, Yen and Jin notice that the walls are covered with pictures of birds, which Mr. Kanuma doesn’t particularly like. They also find that the house is filled with a variety of spirits, that they’ve put up a barrier to keep the boys from roaming through the house, and that one of the Ragun boys’ familiar spirits has been injured by the house spirits. They get the spirit healed after school (at a doctor whose practice doesn’t exactly exist in three dimensions) and they return to the Kanuma house. This time, they get sent on a wild chase throughout the house, although they seem never to leave one room. Amid all the pictures of birds, they find one picture of a boy.