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

by Drazen, Patrick

  51. Just Two Students Chatting

  One time in grade school, Watanuki was resting on a bed in the nurse’s office; he had a bad headache and “was really out of it.” As he lay in bed, alone in the office, he heard a voice ask, “Hey, mister, are you all right?” The voice came from a child who was outside the window, looking in. Watanuki said that he just had a headache, and they spoke for a while. Watanuki had no idea who the boy was, but it was a large school and it was easy to lose track of people unless you see them all the time. After a while, the child waved, said “Take care of yourself,” and was no longer standing at the window.

  It wasn’t until he was feeling better that Watanuki realized something: the nurse’s office was on the third floor of the school. There was no balcony, no fire escape, no ledge, no tree—nowhere someone could stand and look in through that window and have a conversation.

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  Ghosts have also been known to appear in medical anime/manga in another circumstance: when a character is undergoing surgery due to a life-threatening condition. While they are under anesthetic, a character is seen as on the border between the worlds of the living and the dead, especially if that character has almost given up the will to live.

  Two examples out of many:

  Kodocha is an abbreviation of the phrase Kodomo no Omocha (Children’s Toys).[61] This girls’ manga by Miho Obana ran in Ribon magazine from 1994 to 1998 and was later animated into a popular series. The story centers on child actress and idol Sana Kurata and her attempts to have a “normal” life (as normal as possible, anyway, between hosting her own TV series, her mother being a reclusive novelist, and her mother’s assistant being a transvestite). She has been seeing Akito, a classmate who’s something of a loner, in no small part because he’s been made to feel guilty because his mother died giving birth to him.

  At one point in the manga, Akito is knifed in the woods by a disturbed student named Kazuyuki; by the time they get back to civilization, Akito has lost a lot of blood. He has also nearly lost the will to live, but during the surgery he’s encouraged to keep fighting by the spirit of his mother. Even though he never met her, he recognizes her as such.

  Actually, we see that he’s almost met her. Kazuyuki had become obsessed with Akito’s popularity, and had hoped to receive at least some of that reflected popularity by arranging for the two of them to commit the mutual suicide known as shinjuu. When Akito refuses, Kazuyuki stabs Akito in the arm; by the time they get back to civilization, Akito is dying from his wound. Yet, several times when the boys are in the woods, the manga reader sees the ghostly figure of a woman among the trees. She isn’t identified, but, by the time of Akito’s surgical crisis, we realize that the ghostly woman is his mother, who died in childbirth. She tells her son to “live, for both of us.” We last see her in the operating room, floating up near the ceiling light.

  Similarly, the 1998 weekly anime series Princess Nine revolves around Ryo Hayakawa, daughter of a once-famous Japanese baseball player and nucleus of the first girl’s high school baseball team in Japan. Her father died when she was five years old, but when Ryo requires surgery after rescuing two young children in a flood, under anesthetic her spirit meets her father’s spirit. His advice to Ryo is essentially the same as that given to Akito by his mother: keep on trying, believe in tomorrow and in yourself.

  It’s a message that may seem to ring hollow to some older, more experienced Japanese readers, and especially after the 2011 earthquake and attendant tsunami, but Sana and Akito and Ryo and most of the stars of both stories are not older. They are still of an age where belief is possible, where a better tomorrow is still attainable—the fundamental message of most of the popular culture in Japan.

  CHAPTER 19: AT THE MOVIES: SOME CLASSIC POSTWAR JAPANESE GHOST FILMS

  The first two postwar decades of Japanese movies are hardly known in the west, except perhaps for the tales of Gojira (a/k/a Godzilla) and its other monster buddies such as Mothra and Rodan. But Japanese studios were able to get back on their feet for a number of reasons, and the popularity of ghost stories is one of those reasons. Three movies made between 1950 and 1965 got to America with impressive “art house” credentials, as well as scares, intact. They’re known to serious students of film history as well as those who enjoy a good thrill.

  The first of these three movies is barely a ghost story, but it certainly qualifies; its reputation as one of Japan’s classic movies tends to overshadow the supernatural action.

  Rashomon was filmed in 1950 and directed by Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998), Japan’s best-known postwar director. The reason he was best-known is simple: he was a genius whose style evolved according to developments in film technology. Born into a family of samurai ancestors, Kurosawa’s father was athletics director at a junior high school. He was also an advocate of the new technology of silent movies, and Akira’s older brother Heigo later became a benshi, a narrator of silent films that drew on Japan’s long storytelling tradition. Akira became an apprentice in 1936 at what would later become Toho Studios.

  His influences were broad but also very western, including Shakespeare (Throne of Blood was Kurosawa’s version of Macbeth) and Russian literature, but these were often mixed with Japanese influences such as kabuki theatrical conventions. Similarly, Kurosawa’s movies influenced filmmakers around the world. The classic samurai drama Yojimbo was supposedly based on the books of hardboiled American mystery writer Dashiell Hammett, but was later remade by Italian director Sergio Leone as the first of the so-called “spaghetti Westerns,” A Fistful of Dollars. The Seven Samurai, supposedly influenced by director John Ford, was remade as the American cowboy classic The Magnificent Seven.

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  52. Witness from Beyond

  Rashomon was based on a pair of short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927). Akutagawa’s story “Rashomon” serves as bookends for the movie, while the bulk of the film is based on his “In the Grove.” In ancient times a young, well-to-do couple traveling through the forest is surprised by a bandit. The husband ends up bound and stabbed to death, the wife ends up raped. The bandit and the wife tell violently different versions of what happened (the bandit said the husband fought like a tiger, while the wife ran away; the wife said the bandit ravaged her, while the husband begged her with his eyes to kill him and then kill herself, which she didn’t have the strength to do), and the court hears from a medium who becomes possessed by the ghost of the husband and adds his very different version of events (the bandit raped the wife, who then encouraged the robber to kill the husband; he couldn’t do it, especially after the wife ran off; when the robber cut the husband’s ropes and ran off, the husband committed suicide).[62]

  The medium is a kuchiyose (literally, “lending a mouth”); in this case, giving a voice to the spirit of the dead man. The story’s unique structure offers up different characters telling different versions of the same story, leaving the reader (or movie audience) to try to sort out the truth.

  Incidentally, a minor character in Rashomon, known only as the Policeman, was played by a young actor named Daisuke Kato, who the year before had also appeared in a film version of Japan’s archetypal Kabuki ghost play, Yotsuya Kaidan. (See chapter 11)

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  Three years after Rashomon, director Kenji Mizoguchi offered up another classic Japanese ghost story; actually, a pair of stories. Ugetsu monogatari (1953) began life in 1776 as a collection of ghost stories with accompanying woodblock prints and commentaries. Written by Ueda Akinari, the title can be translated “Stories Under a Moon in the Rain.” Of the nine stories in the collection, director Mizoguchi used two (plus part of a third) in his film of the same name.

  The nine original stories actually are quite different from the scare-inducing stories written down by Lafcadio Hearn or the gruesome shock films of today. Ueda’s ghost stories are meant to be examples of virtue and moral uplift—even if a couple of the examples are rather extreme. The stories are sometimes pleasant, as in “I Dreamed
of a Carp,” in which a Buddhist monk from the Heian Era, who was so committed to not killing that he paid fishermen to throw back their catch, has a fever dream in which he lives the life of a carp. “Chrysanthemum Tryst” shows brotherly love to an extreme, as two men—one a poor scholar and the other a warrior nursed back to health by the scholar—swear friendship and vow to meet again at that year’s Chrysanthemum Festival (on the ninth day of the ninth month), after the warrior goes home to help his family. The warrior doesn’t return until the night of the Chrysanthemum Festival; in fact, only his ghost returns to the scholar. The soldier was imprisoned when he returned home and could only keep his promise by committing suicide, so that at least his spirit could visit his friend.

  At the other end of the scale is “The Blue Hood.” This story starts with the obsessive love of an abbot for one of his young students. When the boy dies, the abbot’s obsession turns to the most literal way to possess the young student: cannibalism. A more devout priest is able to exorcize the evil spirit of the obsessed abbot.

  Mizoguchi’s film uses two stories from the Ugetsu Monogatari about two married couples, who end up with very different destinies.

  53. Welcome Home

  In “The House Amid the Thickets,” we meet the farmer Katsushiro and his wife Miyagi, trying to make a living on their farm in Shimosa province, on Japan’s Pacific coast. Convinced that he can make more money as a silk merchant hundreds of miles away in Kyoto, Katsushiro leaves home one spring day, promising his wife Miyagi that he’ll be home by autumn. In fact, he doesn’t return for seven years, after bandits steal the money he made in Kyoto and war breaks out in Shimosa. When he finally gets home, Miyagi joyfully greets him. When he wakes up the next morning, he realizes the truth: his wife had died shortly after he set off seven years earlier, and he had spent the night talking with her spirit.

  54. Domestic Disturbance

  In contrast is “The Lust of the White Serpent.” Toyoo, the son of a well-off fisherman, abandons his fiancée and chases after the rich widow Manago. When he agrees to marry her, Manago presents him with a sword which turns out to have been stolen. When the police try to arrest Manago, she disappears with a flash of lightning. Despite this indication that Manago was a demon in human form, she reappears to Toyoo later and asks forgiveness—and he’s foolish enough to agree. When an elderly priest exposes Manago as a white serpent demon, Toyoo flees again to his original fiancée. One night, Manago possesses Toyoo’s new wife; the serpent is exorcised, but the wife dies.

  These two stories from Ueda’s anthology were, in a sense, the same story: a cautionary tale from the 18th century that resonated with postwar Japan. Ugetsu served, with its stylized ghost stories, to remind its audience to stay close to home, to be faithful to the traditions that kept Japan alive for centuries. Perhaps Mizoguchi already knew the upheavals the rest of the twentieth century would bring.

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  One of the oldest English books of Japanese lore focused on ghost stories: Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan (published in 1904, the year of his death), which also became one of Japan’s best-known ghost movies when directed by Masaki Kobayashi, screenplay by Yoko Mizuki (1964).

  This film contains four distinct, separate stories. In “Black Hair”, a poor samurai, who divorces his true love to marry for money, finds the marriage disastrous and returns to his old wife, only to discover (to put it mildly) something eerie about her. In “The Woman in the Snow” a woodcutter, stranded in a snowstorm, meets an icy spirit in the form of a woman; she spares his life on the condition that he never tell anyone about her. A decade later, in a moment of weakness he forgets his promise. The third story, “Hoichi the Earless”, focuses on a blind musician living in a monastery, who sings so well that a ghostly imperial court commands him to perform the epic ballad of their death battle for them. The ghosts of the Heike royalty are draining away his life, and the monks set out to protect him by writing holy scriptures over his body to make him invisible to the ghosts. But, as the title suggests, they’ve forgotten something… Although he pays a large price, in the end Hoichi agrees to play “for the rest of my life so that these sorrowful spirits may rest in peace.”

  55. Swallowing a Soul

  Finally, in “In a Cup of Tea”, a writer introduces a fragment of an old story dating from the 17th century. It tells of a man who keep seeing a face reflected in his cup of tea; a face that’s not his own. It’s the face of a swordsman who threatens to come back and avenge the wrongs done him. However, nobody else can see the ghostly swordsman or his attendants. As for the short-story writer, he has left the tale deliberately unfinished, knowing that the reader’s imagination, dealing with the matter of “swallowing a soul” by drinking the reflection in a cup of tea, would be more chilling than anything the writer could make up. The visiting publisher is interrupted by a terrified scream from the writer’s servant. She, and then the publisher, run off after seeing the image of the writer reflected in the teapot.

  In a sense, this fourth segment is also an inspiration for Ringu. Buildings can obviously be haunted, but it’s sometimes more horrifying when ghosts are found in common household objects, such as a teacup—or a television set.

  Incidentally, there’s an anime connection to Kwaidan. The blind Hoichi is played by Katsuo Nakamura, a relatively young actor who had already amassed twenty film credits when he made Kwaidan at age 25. In 2004 he supplied the voice of Dr. Lloyd Steam, the visionary inventor who harnessed steam power in new ways, and grandfather to James Ray Steam, the title hero of Katsuhiro Otomo’s film Steamboy. And in 1983 Tatsuya Nakadai, the hapless woodcutter in the “Woman in the Snow” segment, narrated the fifth and final feature film based on Reiji Matsumoto’s Uchu Senkan Yamato manga (the TV series of which was broadcast in the United States as Star Blazers). Nakadai also appeared in a 1978 live action film based on one of the best-known of Osamu Tezuka’s manga, Hi no Tori (The Phoenix).

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  This book has already looked at a number of haunted houses in anime, and there will be others; yet there’s one more in a popular Japanese movie that probably wouldn’t occur to most ghost hunters.

  56. “Hey! Haven’t you heard? You’re living in a haunted house!”

  Animator Hayao Miyazaki went a long way toward establishing his credentials in Japan and around the world—and gave his Studio Ghibli a corporate logo—with his 1988 animated masterpiece Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro). The plot is deceptively simple and at times surprisingly dark, despite the happy, sunny scenes of life in pastoral rural Japan that make up the movie. A college professor and his two daughters, ages four and ten, move to a country house. The girls are greeted with the above declaration by a neighbor boy, Kanta. He may have meant it as a joke or a tease, but supernatural events do indeed begin happening in short order.

  Mei, the younger daughter, encounters several totoro (her childish mispronunciation of troll—tororu in Japanese). Only she can see them at first; then, the older sister Satsuki sees them too. The girls also encounter the Catbus, which is exactly what its name suggests, and briefly encounter what can only be called sentient soot: called “makkuro kurosuke” by the girls and “susuwatari” by Kanta’s granny, these dustballs come closest to “haunting” the house. In fact, they really don’t have much of an investment in it; the first night there, as father and daughters play around in the bathtub (a scene which can make some westerners, who see pedophilia in any scene involving parent/child nudity, rather nervous), the “traveling soot” (translation of susuwatari) start traveling again. In fact, they ride the wind for more than a decade, reappearing in Miyazaki’s 2001 Academy Award-winning masterpiece Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (known in the US as Spirited Away, a pun which works in both English and Japanese).

  This particular house, however, seems to be connected to more high-level spirits. Next door to the property is a road with a torii, a traditional arch used in Shinto to denote the entrance to a shrine or a sacred place. There is no longer a functioning shr
ine on the property, but the hill behind the house is dominated by a gigantic camphor tree. At the base of the tree are the ruins of an old shrine, while around the tree is stretched a shimenawa. This rope, woven of rice straw and covered with paper ribbons, is also Shinto in origin, and has been wrapped around the tree as a mark of respect and, in fact, worship. In addition, the roads around the country house are littered with shrines containing jizo statues (see chapter 14 on Ayakashi for details) and a shrine to fox spirits is found near the bus stop where they first see the Catbus. Finally, at the film’s climax, with Mei missing and Satsuki frantic with worry running down the road with a brilliant sunset in the same frame, we see the highest-order spirit of all: the Shinto sun goddess Amaterasu. The sun isn’t depicted as a goddess, because there is no need: a Japanese audience would already recognize the symbolism.[63]

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  These films brought Japanese ghosts to the so-called art houses in the west. Starting in 1998, a cinematic explosion of Japanese ghosts possessed the malls and multi-screen cinemas of America, as a host of Japanese ghost movies were given a Hollywood remake: The Grudge, Dark Water, One Missed Call, among others. The gateway ghost film, however, was better known by its American remake, which popularized some of the distinctive traits of Japanese ghost stories, while neglecting one of the most important clues.

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  Ring versus Ringu