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

by Drazen, Patrick

  The final scene, in which Mayu bids farewell to Kagome before ascending to heaven and Becoming One with the Cosmos, takes place one week after Mayu’s spirit is reconciled with her mother. On the day her brother Satoru is released from hospital, Mayu’s spirit appears to Kagome; this involves an important costume change. We see her in a lovely summer yukata, the kind worn to a Bon festival. This is the most blatant cue to the audience, along with the closed eyes and smiling face of the Tatari-mokke, that Mayu has found peace.

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  We’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves, however. There are still a lot of ghosts to cover in ancient Japan, and they’re worth mentioning because, as we’ve already seen, many of them manage to stay around even into the 21st century. But the Tatari-mokke raises the issue that, to get safely from this world to the next world, one needs a guide.

  CHAPTER 4: “I’LL BE YOUR GUIDE”

  Botan—Yuyu Hakusho

  Yoshihiro Togashi’s manga Yuyu Hakusho (a name that can mean “Poltergeist White Paper”) starts with the death of the hero: a juvenile delinquent named Yusuke Urameshi.[10] A disrespectful brawler who seldom shows up for school, Yusuke made the mistake of trying to stop a toddler from playing in traffic; the car that almost hit the child killed Yusuke instead.

  Once his spirit realizes what’s happened, he meets the unusually chipper Botan. Riding the oar of a boat as if it were a witch’s broom, she tells Yusuke that she’ll be his guide to the underworld. Not permanently; it seems that this punk’s lone act of consideration has disrupted the afterlife to the point that they weren’t ready for him. He therefore had the option of taking a test to come back to life. But, by going directly to Hell with Botan (whose name means the peony flower), they bypass the River Sanzu.

  According to Japanese tales of the afterlife, the River Sanzu runs between this world and the next. There are three ways to cross (since “san” in Japanese means three). People with many dire sins on their souls have to swim across the deepest part of the river, which also contains nests of snakes; those with fewer sins have to cope with rapids. The sinless can cross on a solid stone bridge. This three-crossing arrangement sensibly takes into account that people are seldom purely good or purely evil.

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  Takuto and Meroko—Full Moon-wo Sagashite

  Arina Tanemura’s 2001 shojo manga Full Moon-wo Sagashite (Looking for the Full Moon) features a twelve-year-old girl, Mitsuki Koyama, who has developed a tumor in her throat. This makes it painful to sing, and singing is the one dream of her young life. (The dream is complicated by the fact that Mitsuki lives with her maternal grandmother, who never stops reminding her that she despises music in general as well as what it did to her daughter, Mitsuki’s mother.)

  When Mitsuki finds out that she only has a year to live, she doesn’t hear the news from her doctor, but from the Angels of Death, Pediatrics Division. These spirit guides, a guy named Takuto and a girl named Meroko who in life had committed suicide, look like teenagers, move through walls, and are invisible to everyone else except as, respectively, a stuffed cat and a stuffed rabbit.

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  A story in the CLAMP manga xxxHolic doesn’t seem to start out as a ghost story; true ghost stories actually occur rather rarely in this manga/anime series. But this kaidan is more than just a modern example of traditional beliefs. Brought from the distant past successfully to the 21st century, it achieves many of its chills in the way it sneaks up on the audience. As an added bonus, Watanuki, hapless assistant to the self-described witch Yuko, stops being his usual whining dramatic self when it really matters.

  07. The Red Hydrangea

  One rainy day, the main quartet of the story—Yuko the witch, Watanuki, the cute but mysterious Himawari, and the stolid Domeki—receive a mysterious request from a non-human client. The adolescent-looking girl with the umbrella is actually an ame-warashi, a rain spirit. When such a character appeared in Rumiko Takahashi’s Urusei Yatsura, she was a playful child in kimono, using a giant leaf as an umbrella. Here, she has blue-tinted hair in the manga (red in the anime), a parasol, a western dress in the style known as “Lolita Goth”, and a haughty disdain for humans. The spirit explains that she needs Watanuki and Domeki to perform an unspecified service; Himawari contributes two hair ribbons to the mission, and the boys follow the ame-warashi to a park.

  The spirit leads the boys to a hydrangea bush in the park, and they immediately realize that something is unnatural. The bush is as large as a tree, and, more important, the hydrangea is showing blood-red flowers; hydrangea flowers are blue, pink, white, but never blood-red. Watanuki, holding one of the ribbons, examines the bush, but doesn’t see a tendril of the hydrangea reaching out toward him, wrapping itself around his ankle, and pulling him into the plant.

  What he finds there is a twilit wasteland with no markers, a foul stench, and a crying little girl who looks to be about six years old. The little girl doesn’t want to go back home; tearfully she explains that she’s gotten dirty and gross and nobody will accept her. Watanuki at first walks with the girl toward the source of the foul odor, which still can’t be seen. A disembodied chorus of voices warns them both not to go there. At this point, a ribbon descends from above: Himawari’s other ribbon, which was given to Domeki. Watanuki holds up his ribbon with one hand, and holds the little girl’s hand with the other. They are pulled up and up—

  Watanuki awakens at the edge of the hydrangea bush. He thought his encounter with the little girl had only taken minutes; from Domeki’s point of view, ten hours had passed. Watanuki then looks at the little girl’s hand, and finds that he is holding the shriveled, skeletal hand of a child’s corpse.

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  Yuko explains that the child disappeared almost a year ago; her corpse had lain under the hydrangea during that time. This echoes the traditional Japanese belief stated later in this book: that corpses were a source of pollution. This also accounted for the unnatural growth and blood-red flowers of the hydrangea. Watanuki and the girl had been walking toward the border between the world and the after-life; specifically, to the land of those who suffered and were murdered. This accounted for the stench. If Watanuki had accompanied the girl there, he would have died; the voices that tried to stop them were the hydrangea. However, the girl’s body had not yet been discovered, and (another recurring Japanese theme) her bones had to be found so that her soul could be put right. With the discovery of her body, the proper rites could be performed and her soul could then pass over.

  There’s one other bit of good news in this episode: Watanuki, who normally would freak out when he realized the identity of the girl and saw he was holding hands with a skeleton, kept his composure and kept his promise to the little girl. His last words to her were, “I’m very proud of you.” It seems he’s finally maturing as well.

  The point of this explanation, and part of the point of this book, is that the Japanese audience for whom xxxHolic was created would already know all of this. A western audience would still be able to enjoy the chills of this story, and all of the others, but might not understand all of the symbols and details.

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  Rinne

  For more than three decades, Rumiko Takahashi has reigned as one of the giants of manga. Beginning with Urusei Yatsura, with Japan invaded by boorish, obnoxious, and (in the case of Lum, sexy) space aliens, Takahashi has been one of the most consistently successful manga artists. Her career moved from strength to strength, including the Gothic chills of the Mermaid stories, the stellar romantic comedy Mezon Ikkoku and the gender-warping farce Ranma ½. Nobody would have blamed her if she retired after the completion of her magnum opus InuYasha, with more than three decades of influential and popular manga to her credit. However, she just rolled into another title, Kyoukai no Rinne, which, conveniently for this book, is solidly (and humorously) in Japan’s ghost tradition.

  The ghost of the title, Rinne Rokudo, is a guide shepherding spirits from the real world to the spirit world. He looks like a high school s
tudent—to whoever can see him. At first, this is limited to one student, whose involvement with the ghost and his tasks just gets deeper and funnier. We’ll examine this manga later on.

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  08. “The afterlife sure seems to have a lot of rules.”

  Omukae desu, a five-volume manga by Meca Tanaka, takes a gently humorous approach to the problem of spirits who refuse to cross over when their time comes. Madoka Tsutsumi, a high school student studying for the college entrance exams, witnesses an argument one day between two people: another young guy named Nabeshima[11] and old Mr. Baba, whose house is a few doors away. However, Nabeshima is dressed in a giant pink bunny suit, while the last time Madoka saw Mr. Baba was at the old man’s wake. Yes, once again, a student can see dead people.

  Nabeshima complains that, while “usually dead people can find their own way to the other side,” he’s got far too much work delivering spirits to the afterlife (actually shlepping them on the back of a motor scooter) to spend time on the stubborn ones who simply refuse to go. He offers a bargain to Tsutsumi: even though Nabeshima already has two assistants (a living co-ed named Aguma and a ghostly young girl named Yuzuko), Motoka can help out as a temp worker (a dilemma faced by many Japanese college students: finding a part-time job to make ends meet) by coaxing reluctant spirits to leave the world of the living, and he’ll get paid in the afterlife. The payment is described as “a free trip to Heaven;” once he agrees, Nabeshima starts calling Tsutsumi “En-chan,” since the kanji for his name Motoka can also be pronounced “En,” and “En” is Japanese for “karma.”

  Back to old Mister Baba. His insistence on staying behind is simple: his only child, a daughter, is pregnant and almost due, he wants to see the child, but the spirits of the dead aren’t supposed to be near a child when it’s born, perhaps to avoid interfering with its own soul. In any case, he can’t get to the maternity ward without a body, so Tsutsumi lets Mr. Baba use his body to view the child, as well as giving him a vote in naming the child.

  09. The Ring

  Megu Koike died as a little old lady, but has stayed rooted to one spot on earth and refuses to budge; getting her to leave is Tsutsumi’s job. Tsutsumi, Yuzuko and the curiously silent Aguma were told to “get your butts in gear” and help Koike look for a lost ring on a riverbank. They had until sunset to find this one token that mattered to Koike.

  Aguma basically sat there and stared into space, not helping to look at all. Tsutsumi asks the old lady’s ghost why she had the precious ring in her pocket rather than on her finger. She admitted that the ring was a gift from someone she loved in her youth, before she got married to someone else. Back in the day, she was a servant in a wealthy family’s house, and she fell in love with the young son of the family. Besides being of separate classes, which would have ruled out a romance between them, the young man was in poor health, and died shortly after Koike left their employ. First, however, he gave her a ring as a token of a love that could never bear fruit.

  This triggers an outburst from Aguma. She has learned that Nabeshima isn’t on this job because he’s put in for a transfer to a higher-ranking job in the afterlife, and she’s furious. “What am I, a bug? I don’t even rate a goodbye?! All I can do now is hate him with a passion! The next time I see him, I’m gonna punch him in the nose!” When Nabeshima shows up, however, having decided not to get the transfer, Aguma hugs him rather than slugs him. “This is all I can do,” the reader hears her say; “I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. All I need is now.” This reflects Koike’s own slightly mixed emotions as she prepares to rejoin her husband in the afterlife. When asked why she’s going to be with her husband when she loved the young master, Koike scoffs, “My husband kept me happy for fifty years; thanks to him, I had only one regret.” In fact, she lost the ring while playing on the riverbank with her grandchildren. Just because she didn’t get the romance she wanted didn’t deprive her of a lifetime of happiness. Life, it seems, is more complicated than we like to think.

  CHAPTER 5: A LIKELY STORY

  Folktales and legends in Japan—about ghosts or anything else—are a major part of that country’s literature. The foundation for these stories is a group of 45 collections, written mostly around the years 1100 and 1200 C. E., although some other major collections are hundreds of years older or younger.

  The subject matter of these tales is literally universal. Some stories came to Japan from China or India; others are meant to illustrate Buddhist teachings; still others illustrate small or large events at the royal court. As time and history progress, the emphasis on some subjects grows or declines; the more modern the story, for example, the more likely it is to talk about farming.

  While the stories touched on a wide range of activities, those who collected and wrote down these stories were from Japan’s upper classes, since they had both the education in Chinese literary classics and the leisure time to set the stories down with the proper amount of style and grace. If there was one major difference between the legends of Japan and the stories of Greek fable-teller Aesop or the tales collected by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, it is this: the Japanese stories were presumed to be absolutely true; at the very least, they had to appear to be true. Many of the Japanese stories, therefore, go into great detail in describing the time or place in which they happened, no matter how outrageous the events of the story may seem to the modern reader.

  The literary style of the original stories varied, with some of the tales told in proper, very serious traditional Chinese and others in more conversational Japanese (in those days, an educated courtier was expected to know both languages). Beyond that, the person who gathered and wrote down the stories (these collectors are almost all anonymous) was expected to edit and shape the stories for maximum effect, making funny stories funnier, making pathetic stories more pathetic, highlighting horror or devotion as needed.

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  Looking just at tales of Japanese ghosts, their stories can be put into several groups. These would include dealing with the corpse of a dead person, respecting the spirit that inhabited a body to stop it becoming a vengeful ghost, or pacifying a ghost of someone who died violently or in emotional turmoil. In some extreme cases, this would involve the change of a human ghost into a god.

  Following the death of a person, the corpse traditionally was considered a source of pollution and had to be disposed of properly. Generally this meant cremation, but other methods included burying the body or, at least, hiding it in a cave or even an abandoned building.

  10. The Neglected Wife

  Did properly dealing with a corpse make a difference? Consider this story from the Konjaku monogatari shuu (Tales of times now past, generally just called the Konjaku), written around the year 1100. It’s the story of a poor man living in Kyoto with his devoted young wife. They couldn’t make ends meet until the man learned that an acquaintance of his had been named governor of a distant province. He went to his acquaintance in search of a position and was hired. But, because the province was so far away, he left his wife behind. He missed her (although not so much that it stopped him from taking up with another woman). Finally the governor’s term of office ended, and the man returned to his wife in Kyoto, arriving at night.

  The house he returned to was in ruins, but his wife was still there, and she joyously welcomed him back. They spoke of his life in the faraway province, until they finally fell asleep near dawn, with the husband vowing to use the money he had earned to make everything right by his neglected wife.

  When he awoke, he beheld the woman in his arms—except that he was holding a corpse, little more than skin stretched over a skeleton. In a panic, he ran to the house next door and asked what had happened.

  “She took sick when her husband left,” the neighbor said, “and died a few months ago. She had no friends or family to dispose of the body, so it’s been there all this time. Everyone in town is afraid to go near the place.”

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  That story appears in several
different forms, including its retelling by Lafcadio Hearn in the book Kwaidan and the film of the same name; not just because it’s a memorable way to creep out one’s audience, but because it reminds its audience of something of vital importance to the Japanese soul. Obligation to the ancestors starts early and extends beyond the grave—and yet the grave itself is a necessary part of the equation. In episode 45 of the Shaman King manga by Hiroyuki Takei, hero Yoh Asakura confronts Faust VIII, a descendant of the western Dr. Faustus, who has tried to keep his murdered wife alive through magic. “Everyone dies, eventually,” Yoh tells Faust. “That’s what makes life precious. If you conquer death, will life still have value?”[12] (vol. 6, p. 23)

  Respect for the bones of the deceased is part of the traditional Buddhist burial rite, which is why this next story is no less shocking to the Japanese than the story of the man from Kyoto sleeping with his wife’s corpse. The kicker here: whether one believes the above story or not, this next story is absolutely true.

  11. Barefoot Gen—His Mother’s Bones

  This is the story of an eight-year-old boy who lived with his family in the city of Hiroshima. On August 6, 1945 he was on his way to school when a single airplane dropped a single bomb over the city. Within a minute, everything had changed: wooden buildings burst into flame, concrete buildings were reduced to rubble and twisted metal, trolley cars were shoved off of their tracks. Some people were vaporized where they stood by the use of the world’s first atomic weapon. That day, some 55,000 people were killed at once; an equal number had to wait for the end, sometimes for years, while radiation devoured their bodies. The boy’s mother survived the blast, like her son, and lived to see her son grow up, get married, and start a career. When she died, everyone realized how sick the bomb had left her.