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

by Drazen, Patrick

  Director Hideo Nakata and screenwriter Hiroshi Takahashi, adapting a novel by Koji Suzuki, redefined the ghost story for Japan and Hollywood, and did it by mixing new technologies with the best aspects of Japanese horror stories. Unfortunately, Ringu (1998) was remade as “The Ring” (2002), directed by Gore Verbinski, who’s perhaps best known now as director of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise; the screenplay was written from Suzuki’s novel by Ehren Kruger.

  57. Seven Days

  Journalist and single mother Reiko Asakawa is researching an urban legend, interviewing kids about a ‘Cursed Video.’ When her niece Tomoko dies of “sudden heart failure” with a look of terror on her face, Reiko investigates. She finds out that some of Tomoko’s friends who had been on holiday with Tomoko the week before had died on exactly the same night at the exact same time in the exact same way. Reiko goes to the cabin where the teens had stayed and finds an unlabeled video tape. Reiko watches the tape, only to discover it’s the cursed videotape. She finds out by a means that is at once mundane and frightening: the phone rings. (This is the “ring” of the title; it doesn’t refer to a piece of jewelry.) A voice tells Reiko that she will die in seven days.

  Reiko’s ex-husband Ryuji helps Reiko try to solve the mystery before the week runs out, and Reiko makes a copy of the tape for him. Things become grimmer when their son Yoichi watches the tape saying his aunt Tomoko (the dead one) had told him to, and the phone rings… . Their research takes them to a volcanic resort island where they discover that the video has a connection to Shizuko Yamamura, a psychic who died 30 years ago, and her child Sadako…

  The resolution of Ringu comes as the clock runs toward midnight on Reiko’s seventh day. They look under the vacation cabin and realize that it was built over the ruins of the well where Sadako met her death. Reiko searches through the muck at the bottom of the well, and finds Sadako’s skull. With literally a minute to go before she stands to die, Reiko is holding the skull of the agency that would kill her. She clutches the skull to her bosom and starts sobbing. As she does, slime oozes from the skull’s eye sockets. This scene, which wasn’t in the American version, ties Ringu to the principal belief, almost an article of faith in Japanese manga and anime: that the purpose of eyes is to cry. Reiko’s crying over the skull of the abandoned and murdered Sadako, an expression of compassion for the long-forgotten dead girl, neutralizes the curse for her and her son. Ex-husband Ryuji isn’t so lucky, as the ghost of Sadako comes for him by crawling out of the television picture tube…

  Suzuki’s novel has more than a grain of truth to its back-story about Sadako and her mother Shizuko. The character of Shizuko Yamamura is based on a real person, Chizuko Mifune, born in 1886 in Kumamoto Prefecture, who was rumored to have the gift of foresight. After a demonstration in 1910, she was proclaimed a charlatan and committed suicide a year later by jumping into a volcano. (Let the record show, though, that Suzuki’s novel was also inspired in part by the Hollywood ghost story Poltergeist.)

  CHAPTER 20: SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHY

  Two landmarks from modern Japanese ghost cinema have scenes that rely on still photographs for their chills. One interesting scene from Ringu shows the heroine looking through photographs of the young people on holiday, a week before they died. Everything looks normal, except in one snapshot: there, the faces of the victims—and only their faces—are blurred beyond recognition, as if deliberately smudged by somebody’s thumb. Of course, this kind of botched photo can always be dismissed as a mistake in the developing process. There’s surely a perfectly reasonable, logical, and prosaic explanation…

  A similar scene takes place in Ju-On (known in the west as The Grudge) after three schoolgirls disappear. They had gone with a friend to a reputedly haunted house; the friend had left early, but was now staying away from school. A few of her other friends offer to take her copies of pictures from the last school trip; when they get them developed, they see that the eyes of the missing girls have all been blacked out. Maybe there isn’t always a logical explanation…

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  Moon Phase

  This supernatural romantic comedy, fairly sweet and relatively tame (given that it airs “after hours” on Japan television at 1:45 a.m.), doesn’t have a lot to do with ghosts. The heroine is a cute, bossy, juvenile looking and acting vampiress named Hazuki.[64] She bites into a Japanese boy and expects him to become her slave; when that doesn’t happen, the lad, Kouhei Morioka, is understood to be in a special category: a Vampire’s Lover. Rather than follow Hazuki and Kouhei down the course of true love, however, we should note Kouhei’s profession: a freelance magazine photographer. However, he has trouble selling most of his work because of his other inadvertent talent: he’s a gifted spirit photographer. So gifted, in fact, that even doing a simple layout in a candy store gets spoiled by the ghosts that appear in his pictures. If his best friend, Hiromi Anzai, wasn’t Managing Editor at Occult Magazine, he’d probably never sell a single photo.

  And then there’s…

  Ai yori Aoshi

  This romantic-comedy manga by Ko Fumizuki, which began running in 1998 and was a successful television anime from 2002 to 2004, has a very minor role for some ghosts, but establishes the continuing attraction of ghost stories, even in a technological 21st century, as well as their invasion of that technology.

  Kaoru Hanabishi, a college law student, crosses paths with a girl who dresses in old-fashioned kimono and speaks in a formal, stilted manner. She turns out to be the fiancée he hasn’t seen in fifteen years. He was “engaged” to Aoi Sakuraba, the heiress to a prominent family, when they were both children. However, Kaoru’s mother was sent away from the equally prestigious Hanabishi clan when Kaoru’s father died, since his parents had never been married; the clan, however, kept custody of the boy. When his mother died as well, Kaoru ultimately rebelled and left the Hanabishi. Aoi, however, never gave up the dream of her intended fiancée, so, when she turned eighteen, she sought out Kaoru, moving in with him (along with a chaperone assigned by her mother).

  She gradually gets to know other facets of Kaoru’s life, including his involvement with the college Photography Club. When the club goes on a summer retreat to a mountain inn (in a pair of manga episodes from 1999), the club president assigns a task to a new initiate: go into the woods at night and take a picture of a ghost. The newbie does just that—which unnerves the club president, whose own ghost photograph was a fake.

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  When Tatsunoko, one of Japan’s major animation houses, celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 2004 by producing Karas, an OAV about a guardian policing the border between real life and the spirit realm, a press release quoted director Keiichi Sato and his ambivalent opinion on the spirit world:

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t really get youkai (Japanese [ghosts, spirits, and monsters] causing mysterious, outrageous and sometimes wonderfully life affirming events). I do have a grasp on the fact that they coexist with us and keep the boundary of the human world in balance.”

  Of course, the whole point of a ghost story is the occasional imbalance, the crossing of a ghost into the human world. This sense of a comfortable reality being violated contributes to the chills one gets from a good ghost story. And this is the context for the Japanese perspective on spirit photography.

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  58. Dangerous Crossing

  The children of Gakkou no Kaidan[65] hear that a woman’s ghost has been haunting a rural railroad crossing. Leo gives them all cameras, telling them that “cameras see what humans cannot.” Only Momoko, the oldest girl, says that ghosts don’t like to be forcibly awoken, so they ought to be left alone. This isn’t easy to do, since when Leo develops a picture he took of Momoko, there’s a ghostly hand on her shoulder. The next morning, before Leo can show anyone else the picture, Satsuki brings word that Momoko is in the hospital.

  Momoko tells her hospital visitors that she just felt a tightness in her chest; this, however, would be a tipoff to anyone Japanese, because the Japan
ese language has a word for this phenomenon: kanashibari. The word literally means “bound by metal” but carries the assumption that if a sleeping person feels heaviness on the chest, it’s the weight of a ghost sitting on them. Momoko may well believe the folklore explanation.

  It gets worse. Momoko looks impassively at the ghost photo, then takes off her bed-jacket. This reveals her shoulder; the area touched in the picture by the ghost hand has a large, hand-shaped discoloration. It’s the ghost of a woman, Momoko thinks; last night she was at my bedside glaring at me. But I can’t tell the doctor or my parents, she goes on.

  Satsuki’s cat, possessed by a local demon, speculates that the spirit is a jibakurei, tied to that particular place by circumstance. He describes jibakurei as carrying a lot of hostility over the abrupt way they left this world. Leo, meanwhile, tries an amateur exorcism to get the ghost images out of the picture and negatives. Instead, there’s an explosion in Leo’s darkroom, and a pair of ghostly hands end up around Momoko’s neck, trying to choke her to death.

  Leo gets to the hospital about the same time as the doctor is telling Momoko’s parents that she’ll have to be moved into Intensive Care. As the nurses are rolling her down the hall, Leo can actually see the ghost standing next to Momoko. The possessed cat later tells Leo that the jibakurei needs to be approached as the human she once was, to find out what would settle her heart.

  Leo brings flowers to the railroad crossing where they first went looking for the ghost, and while there he meets an elderly woman also bringing flowers to the spot. She turns out to be the mother of the dead girl, Shizuko. The mother has an altar set up with incense and other tokens of remembrance, which ought to be enough to dispel the ghost. But Shizuko had been killed in a hit-and-run three years earlier, and no witnesses ever came forward. The real tragedy, according to the mother, was that Shizuko had just gotten engaged. When they found her body, however, her engagement ring was gone.

  Leo goes back to the crossing to look for the missing ring. Suddenly he sees Momoko standing on the tracks, with a train approaching. The others try to move her, but the possessed Momoko tosses them aside and runs toward the oncoming train. Leo ultimately drags Momoko off of the tracks, which wakes up Momoko; now she knows where the missing ring is. They go to the local taxi company and find it under the seat of a taxi; the ring was too large and had fallen off Shizuko’s finger when the cabdriver tried to help. The driver sees the children poking around his cab and chases them away. However, once again on a rainy night, the driver thinks he sees a woman at the crossing. When she vanishes this time, and reappears in the back seat, she tells the driver that she’s found the ring.

  The driver screams. The taxi disappears. So does the image of Shizuko from the photograph of Momoko.

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  59. Family Snapshots

  A two-part episode of the manga by Yoshiyuki Nishi, Muyo to Rouji, which premiered in 2005, focuses on spirit photographs, but only as a side-issue. Like so many of the stories in Japanese pop culture, the real point of this tale is human relations.

  One of the ghost-hunting firm’s former clients returns with a referral—another potential client. This time, it’s a high school girl named Nana. She brings in some snapshots, since photography is her hobby. Her friend suspects that some of her photos may contain a spirit; this is a notion that Nana scoffs at. She clearly refuses to believe that spirit photography is anything but fake—even when Muyo tells her that all twenty of the photos she brought contain a spirit in them. He declares that the spirit who appears in all twenty photographs—because there is only one—has violated spirit assault and trespass laws and is to be punished. When he tries, however, the weapons are turned on Muyo instead.

  This is a unique safeguard in spirit law enforcement: if the law is misapplied, the mistaken lawyer is punished. Once they realize this, Muyo understands, and tells Nana that the ghost is that of her father. “It must have been very hard for him that his own daughter couldn’t notice him. Ghosts usually don’t have a clear mind. But they never forget the things that were most important to them.” At the end of his life, just before he suddenly died of a heart attack, Nana’s father had hit the skids in his photographic career and was taking spirit photographs. Nana argued with her father that he was a charlatan, but still tried otherwise to respect him; she even explains that she participated in his Buddhist funeral, passing his bones among family and friends with chopsticks as a sign of respect, “so that he could go to Heaven peacefully.” (see chapter 5) His appearances in her photos were only to accomplish one thing: to tell Nana that he forgave her.

  Muyo announces that the father’s ghost still broke ghostly law, except that essentially he did no more than commit invasion of privacy. His punishment would be to “ride the boat”; that is, to cross the River Sanzu (see chapter 4) and continue his journey to rebirth.

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  Spirit photography goes back to the invention of photography itself, in the middle 19th century. The technology was slow and cumbersome for those early pictures, and involved having subjects pose absolutely still for sixty seconds or longer while the light exposed the chemically treated film. It was always possible to create a double exposure: using the same piece of film to capture two pictures. Usually, this would cancel out both pictures, and any surviving double exposures would be painfully obvious as such. However, by coincidence or other results, some double exposures can seem surprisingly composed, even uncanny in their interpreted meaning.

  The first known “spirit photographer” surfaced in Boston in 1861. William Mumler took a self-portrait, noted another figure in the picture beside him, and began running photo-séances. This lasted for about a decade until he was exposed as a fraud; he had an assistant sneak into the picture for ten seconds or so, just long enough to leave a ghostly image.[66]

  Of course, it’s one thing to find out that ghost photos had been deliberately staged. What happens when an amateur takes pictures, and discovers that what one sees is not always what one gets?

  While much of the interest in spirit photography in the West was spurred on by wars (the Civil War, World Wars 1 and 2) and the subsequent desire of families to contact those killed in action, scholar Richard Chalfen suggests that Japan, with centuries of belief that ghosts are no less real than people, plays by different rules:

  photographs made, used and interpreted in Japan may, indeed, carry an alternative epistemological load. These home mode (sic) pictures may have a different sense of currency, authority and power than generally accepted in the West. Connections with animistic beliefs may begin to “explain” some of these information issues as well as the tendency to travel with photographs, to reach recently deceased relatives via images, to be comforted by specific pictures, and, indeed, begin to unravel the controversial existence of ghost-snapshots.

  This is a very tricky and controversial area because, theoretically, I do not believe photographs per se contain any information — they do not say anything, and they certainly do not speak to people. People making photographs as well as looking and using photographs create the meaning, the message and significance of what ever might be recognized in an image — people do the speaking and not photographs.[67]

  Spirit photography in Japan has moved with the times and technology. For a fee (roughly $3/month), cellular phone users have access to the “Kyofu (Horror) Channel”, including a horror role-playing game and accounts of ghost stories from other subscribers as well as spirit photos.[68]

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  Spirit photography can be said to be a modern cousin of the legends and artwork from traditional Japan, as well as the ghost stories out of Hollywood and Tokyo studios. These traditional kaidan and Hollywood/Tokyo’s versions of them meet briefly in another episode of Akachan to Boku (Baby and Me). The toddler Minoru is in preschool; it’s autumn, and the teachers tell an old traditional story, titled in the translation of the manga as “The Three Charms and the Mountain Witch.” It’s also known simply as “The Three Ofuda”[69] and
is parodied in part in the Kyoto field trip sequence of the manga Negima! by Ken Akamatsu.

  An ofuda is a charmed piece of paper on which is written the name of one of the Shinto deities, the name of a temple, or some other significant text. The ofuda is then placed in the home shrine, the kitchen, or some other location to protect the family. (The ofuda is often renewed every year, around New Year’s Day.) They appear in various anime and manga, usually endowed with very exotic powers. Ofuda are used in Ghost! (aka Eerie Queerie) to ward off possession by ghosts. They’re also part of the arsenal of Sailor Mars in Sailor Moon; whether as a Shinto miko (temple maiden) or as one of the Sailor Scouts, she hurls ofuda at the enemy, shouting, “Akuryou taisan!” (Spirits of the dead, depart!) They’re also used by the Buddhist monk Miroku in InuYasha and by Meisuke Nueno, the fifth grade teacher/exorcist in Jigoku Sensei Nube.

  The Shinto ofuda should not be confused with the Buddhist omamori, although there’s a bit of overlap. Omamori are good luck charms or other personal blessings sold at Buddhist temples.

  Ai yori Aoshi includes an omamori in one pivotal scene in which Kaoru talks about his childhood. He was brought up within the Hanabishi family, since he was the love-child of the son and heir to the Hanabishi conglomerate and a woman who wasn’t of an equivalent social rank. When Kaoru’s father died in an auto accident (Kaoru was a child at the time), the Hanabishi clan asked that they bring up Kaoru, and his mother agreed, thinking that at least her son would have a good life. When she died a few years later, the head of the Hanabishi destroyed everything that had to do with Kaoru’s mother. He was able to rescue only one thing from the bonfire: an omamori which contained his umbilical cord—the last connection, literally and figuratively, between Kaoru and his mother.

  But let’s get back to Minoru Enoki, the pre-schooler listening to the story of “The Three Ofuda.” Actually, he’s also watching it, since the teachers have made hand-drawn illustrations of important scenes in the story. This is a form of manga-style storytelling with a long tradition in Japan, called kami-shibai. The storyteller draws scenes on the spot, or works from a “deck” of already-drawn illustrations, while telling the story, complete with character voices and sound effects.