Dark Lanterns

by Zoe Drake

  In the Japanese summer, the gates between this world and the others swing open, and in this dissertation, I will attempt to show how this belief is perpetuated by the spread of urban myth.

  Trisha's senses, suddenly alerted, grabbed the sound and tried to comprehend it. She was suddenly aware of her body, tensed, tangled in the sheets of the futon, and she lay still in the darkened bedroom, listening for whatever had woken her up.

  Her roommate, Tim. The door slammed shut, and she heard footsteps and the rustling of clothes as he moved through the kitchen, past the door of her room, to his own room, right alongside hers.

  Sweat beaded her brow and her upper lip, as she became more attentive, feeling the humid darkness that oozed around her. She really hoped that was all. The only sounds disturbing her tonight, she hoped, would be Tim shucking off his clothes, and hunkering down in his futon with a few sighs and coughs.

  No way. She heard Tim speak in a low monotone. She entertained the stupid notion that he might be talking to himself, but a few seconds later she heard someone give a whispered reply.

  Tim had picked up a new girlfriend, or one-night-stand, or whatever. The apartment - like most Japanese "manshon" buildings, as they euphemistically called them - was basically a large studio room divided up by thin partitions rolled back whenever necessary. Both Tim and Trisha had tried to soundproof the partitions by pinning up flattened cardboard boxes disguised by blankets. Even so, whenever Tim got laid, Trisha was still an unwilling audience.

  Trisha had thought many times about moving out, but the apartment was so damn convenient. Close to Koenji railway station, and a fairly cheap taxi-ride away from the central Tokyo metropolis if she ever missed the last train back. No, the best thing would be for Tim to move out, to shack up at last with one of his girlfriends. Then she could get one of her friends from College to move in. A girl this time. A sister.

  The two roommates had begun to argue, recently, on the subject of Tim's girlfriends. "But Japanese girls are so cool," he'd simpered the day before yesterday, when neither of them had classes and they'd found themselves in the shared kitchen at the same time. "They're more refined, more elegant. And they're so considerate about other people's feelings."

  "Oh, come on!" Trisha had mocked, "What you mean is, they live in a culture where they're forced to be subservient to men. For hundreds of years - and that's one fuck of a long time, Tim - they've been conditioned to think the main role of the woman is to satisfy the man. Father, husband, boss, whatever, be a good little girl and don't rock the boat."

  "But I'm not like that," Tim had protested. "I'm not a Japanese male, and I'm not a husband. Anyway, I'm not a permanent resident here either. What right have I got to criticize this culture?"

  "That's just an excuse, Tim. You're taking advantage of this culture. Most white men here treat Tokyo like one big playground. Some of these girls, you know, they find they've got a nice young gaijin on their hands, but they behave the same as they would if the boyfriend was Japanese. They say or do whatever they think will please him." Trisha had slammed down her coffee in indignation, a wave breaking against the lip of the cup, and casting its backwash messily over the side. "Some guys here are the biggest nerds and geeks out, you know? They can't get laid back home, but over here, the girls are falling over them, just because they come from a 'freedom country'. Big fucking deal."

  "Are you calling me a geek?" Tim said in a carefully measured tone.

  "Don't be stupid, Tim. No. I'm not. I'm just saying that I thought things would be different here from back in the States. Well, they are, but - aw, you know, not in the way I expected."

  A tremulous moan wormed its way through the inadequate barrier of chipboard, cardboard and wool, and Trisha tried to curb the rage gradually making her more and more awake. Or if she couldn't stop it, if she wasn't going to get any sleep again, perhaps she could at least analyze it. Study it. Use it to understand and empower herself, like in the self-improvement books.

  It wasn't just the guys; Trisha had found herself becoming increasingly frustrated with her Japanese sisters. Sometimes it felt like living in a country of Stepford Wives. The schoolgirls everywhere had fake tans, micro-mini-skirts and walked around tapping on a cell-phone with stuffed Mickey Mouse toys hanging from their satchels. The adult women were mostly Chanel-Gucci-Vuitton clones who were proving themselves very faithful to their great Sugar-Daddy God of Shopping. The so-called female celebrities on TV were little better than twelve-year-olds; women who shouted and screamed and jumped up and down, and had cheerfully trained themselves to have voices that had the same effect on Trisha as the sound balloons make when you rub them.

  Tarentos? Fucking retards, all of them.

  It was only in some nightclubs and parties that Trisha had found some Japanese sisters who had anything to say. Even so, she found their unreserved admiration a little suspicious. How they wanted so much to live in the States. How they wanted to know so much about American culture.

  Maybe they were all wearing masks, Trisha thought. Maybe this childish crap was an act to deceive the guys into thinking Japanese girls were their eternal handmaidens, so the girls themselves could twist them around into getting the things they wanted. But if that was true, who benefits? It just ended up perpetuating the whole shitty sexist culture. And still nobody knew what Japanese girls really wanted.

  Seems like what the silly bitch in Tim's room wants is just a good poke, Trisha thought sourly, as she heard the girl on the futon moaning to let her lord and master in.

  Wind-chimes tinkled outside in the night, from the jumble of apartment buildings pushed together by meticulous but dispassionate hands. Trisha tried to focus on the sound, to screen out everything else, as the squeals of the nameless girl got louder and louder.

  Most Japanese visit the temples and shrines only on special occasions, such as the big festivals in the summer and winter. Their funerals are Buddhist and their weddings are Shinto — but these are just customs, they say. The Japanese believe that they themselves are not especially religious.

  It is my contention that belief in the supernatural has survived, despite all the advances of modern life, in the form of urban legends. Some of these contemporary myths appear realistic; they survive because they have a degree of plausibility that permits suspension of disbelief.

  In North American culture there are the ubiquitous tales of the Kentucky Fried Rat and the spider's eggs in the banana bunch. In Japan, their equivalents are such as the department store that showed its ignorance of Christmas customs by putting Santa Claus on a cross; the popular belief that Love Hotels have concealed cameras to videotape their customers' activities and sell them in the Kabukicho porno stores; and the rumors of the secret tunnels under Marunouchi leading away from the Imperial Palace, to ensure the Japanese Royal Family make their honorable escape in times of disaster.

  Naturally, the urban legends told and spread by children contain the strongest elements of the supernatural, and so contain a primal sense of terror. One case in point is the Kuchisake-Onna mentioned in the introduction to this dissertation. Although the character originated in the illustrated scrolls of the Edo period, she made a notable appearance in the greater Tokyo area in the early Eighties. One Tokyo newspaper went so far as to publish a special editorial stating that the Kuchisake-Onna was not real, and appealed for calm. I have interviewed one subject — a female private student of mine — who personally witnessed an outbreak of hysteria at her elementary school, where the children refused to leave school because they actually believed the Kuchisake-Onna waited for them outside the gates.

  Then there is Hanako-chan, the ghost in the toilet. Japanese children usually encounter this story during elementary school. Hanako-chan is a spirit that hides in school toilets and engages the girls in games of suspense and humiliation. The child is told by her peers to knock on the toilet door a certain number of times. If the number is the same number that Hanako-chan is thinking of, the child can enter the toilet unm
olested. If the number is wrong, then the ghost throws open the toilet door, terrifying the unlucky child with her hideous face, and pushing the child's head down the toilet. Here we can see the childhood obsession with bodily functions cross over with the fear of the supernatural.

  Perhaps the most fascinating (relic?) atavism from the Edo period is the anthropomorphic representation of fear itself. This is the creature known as the Buruburu. Strangely, there is no known artistic representation of the Buruburu; but whatever it looks like, if you meet it, a chill will run up and down your back. The Buruburu will follow you, driving you insane with fear, until one of two things happen;

  a). The spirit erases your personality and takes your body over completely.

  b). You die of fright.

  Trisha stopped writing and leaned back in her chair, stretching her arms. Clicked 'stop' on her iTunes and took off her headphones. Nearly midnight.

  She couldn't afford satellite or cable in student digs like this. The best she could do was a portable color Toshiba TV. Flicking it on now, she thought she'd have some mindless entertainment to wind down with, and hopefully she'd be asleep by the time Tim got home.

  She stopped at one channel and frowned at the grainy black-and-white image she saw on the screen. Oh, Jeez. Of course. Because it was O-Bon, the TV channels had wheeled out their annual ghost specials. Reports of paranormal activity. Photographs with curious shadows and lights, the images of dead relatives glimpsed in vacation snapshots. The scene switched to the studio, where the host breathlessly explained one such photograph, taken by Mrs. Tanaka of Chiba. It was of a gathering at the time of the O-Higan, he said, the vernal equinox, when Mrs. Tanaka's family had attended a ceremony at the local temple. She had taken a picture of her husband, her sister and her daughter in the temple parking lot, and at first glance it just seemed like a normal photograph.

  "But we have specially magnified part of the image for this program. If you look here, at this patch of shadow in the background - just inside the temple gate ..."

  Trisha gasped, and looked away.

  She went into the kitchen, started rearranging things in the cupboards, to calm herself down. To stop her heart from racing away from her. To take away that image she'd seen in the picture.

  Why do I do this, she thought. Why do I do this to myself? Why do I have to scare myself stupid? It was a TV special on summer ghosts, for Chrissakes. She shouldn't have watched any of it.

  She went back into her section of the apartment and hastily changed channels, looking for some mindless variety show, with the tarento retards screaming with laughter. Brain Bleach. Anything to calm her down, take away the image.

  The image of that ... face in the shadows.

  Trisha often joked to her friends that she was schizophrenic. Occasionally, she wondered if that were true - because she had been born in Black Hawk, Colorado, just down the highway from Central City.

  Central City had been rich and snooty back in the day, complete with an opera house and beautiful old Victorian homes built with the riches from the Glory Hole gold mine. Black Hawk was the working-class town at the bottom of the heap, with its mining families choking on the fumes of puffing ore smelters. The trees had been cut down to feed the sawmills, and a great sulfur cloud hung over the bare hillsides.

  Then the mines closed and casinos were opened in the Nineties. A fluke in highway engineering meant that gamblers from Denver reached Black Hawk first — and went no further. Black Hawk got rich on the rubes from all over Colorado, and Central City fumed as it watched its visitors and fortunes decline.

  Growing up in high school, Trisha had realized what a crazy place it was. Two tiny communities, sometimes fighting with each other but mostly ignoring each other. It felt like a metaphor for what was going on inside her head.

  Trisha had her first encounter with urban legends at her Catholic elementary school. A painting of the Pope hung opposite the door to the rest rooms, where the girls would gather after school to whisper ghost stories to each other. In her mind, the face of the Pope, the smell of urine and disinfectant, and the numbing sense of fear were all mixed together. Fear of the two girls who'd died in the service elevator, which was why it wasn't used any more. Fear of the ghost of the girl who jumped off the roof because of the bullying that never stopped. Fear of the school founder's portrait in the library — the eyes turned black when the founder's ghost went walking through the school, they said.

  And then there was Bloody Mary, of course. Bloody Mary got everywhere. Just about every childhood friend of hers had stood in front of the mirror and said "Bloody Mary" three times. Nothing evil had happened to them, but ...

  Trisha had been too scared to ever do it herself.

  When Trisha was fourteen years old, she had told her grandmother about the weird scary thoughts and bad dreams she kept having, and Grandma had got quite angry. "You don't want crazy thoughts like that getting inside your head," she had said. "That's how the Devil tries to lead you off the path. You take this, my girl. You take this, and keep it." And she had given her one of the family Bibles, a volume small enough to fit in the palm of her hand, filled with crinkly cream paper and tiny black print. Trisha had kept it, all through her school days - but she had given it to her parents when she left to take up studying in Japan. It was in storage, along with most of her books and clothes, in her old bedroom.

  She sometimes wondered if that had been a mistake.

  In urban myths, things happen not because the world is a magical place full of wonder, as in folk tales, but because of the world is a place filled with terror. Gabler (1996) states that nothing is reliable, and normal morality is suspended. The alligators in the sewers remind us of a Hell below, populated by wild beasts. The baby-sitter and the phone calls from the upstairs room remind us that we are not safe in our own homes. The man who wakes up in a Mexican hotel room with a kidney missing reminds us of primal body horror.

  The same is true in Japan; urban myths do not give us obstacles to test our character and 'ganbaru' (do our best). The child who has his face mutilated by the Kuchisake-Onna or is tortured in the rest-room by Hanako-chan has not done anything wrong; the whole process is, by its very nature, random. Like so much else in life — tabloids, celebrity gossip, reality shows — urban myths remind us that we are basically impotent. There are no lessons to be learned - there is just the overwhelming presence of fear. Fear of global warming, of environmental disaster, of a random school shooting, of terrorist attack, of financial collapse.

  This fear is like a paper lantern of Japanese custom, but not a jolly red lantern like you would find outside a izakaya pub-restaurant. Imagine a lantern of black, ripped paper, and instead of light, it spreads darkness, it spread shorror, blackening the night, seeping into your dreams and turning them into nightmares.

  In Japanese childhood, there is the tradition of the 'ghost walk'. The child is dared (or sometimes bullied) by his or her friends to walk through a local cemetery at night. The friends lie in wait behind the incense holders and prayer sticks, waiting to ambush the child and scare him into giving up, and turning back. This is the child's initiation into adult society and the constant, low-level fear that fuels it.

  The constant, nagging fear that whatever you do, it will never be good enough.

  Trisha walked out of the thick, liquid night and into the cool haven of the manshon lobby, fishing in her handbag for the key, turning her head — as she habitually did — to see if anyone had entered the building behind her. The sound hit her as soon as she opened the door. The girl's screams as she worked up to the climax, and just beneath it, Tim's voice. It was pitched too low for Trisha to hear any words. She couldn't even tell if he was speaking in English or Japanese, but she had a pretty good idea of the meaning. Dirty talk; his hot little mouth pressed against her sweaty skin.

  Trisha stood in the parlor, not taking off her shoes, not putting down her bag or her key, just ... standing there. She had an overwhelming urge to turn around and wal
k back out. I will not, she thought. I will not be forced out of my own home.

  She turned her head, and saw her reflection in the mirror next to the door, her pale, bland-looking face beneath her blond hair, tired and unsmiling, the gasping and panting from inside an unfunny counterpoint to her sour expression.

  "Bloody ..." she began, then caught herself, the words sticking in her throat. She turned away from the mirror, and remembered Grandma's Bible. You don't ant thoughts like that getting inside your head.

  Then she turned back, lifted up her face, and stared into her own eyes. "Bloody Mary," she said clearly. "Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary."

  She waited, as the animal sounds ebbed and flowed. Well, she thought, picking up her bag again. That proves one —

  The sensation hit her so fast she had no time to cry out. It was cold, it was intense, and it paralyzed her, freezing her arms and legs, but twisting her head back round to stare again into the mirror.

  Bloody Mary's eyes were livid and shining, glaring through her tangled mane of hair, spittle hissing from between her lips.

  Trisha's head moved slowly, slowly, as if ice-cold hands had gripped it and were moving it as they wanted. She saw the door to Tim's room was open. The young man and the anonymous girl lay on the futon, unmoving, their hacked and ripped limbs splayed in awkward positions, the futon sheets and walls around them stained and splattered with thick, dark liquid. By the futon lay the sushi knife Trisha had bought last month, its blade clotted with blood.

  Trisha did not know if what she was looking at was real. She did not know if it was a vision thrown up by madness.