Yokoshima, slogging through the snow, encounters the woman who’s still trying to kill him. The mountaineer, meanwhile, wants to show Yokoshima how manly mountaineers keep warm in a snowstorm, which is not Yokoshima’s idea of fun. Yokoshima instead chases the woman, even as he’s chased by the mountaineer’s ghost; they all run right down the mountain and into Mikami’s hot springs.
Okinu, the woman, explains that she died some three hundred years ago, when she was sacrificed to the volcano god. However, she never actually crossed over to become a mountain spirit. With Mikami’s help, the mountaineer’s spirit becomes god of the mountain; as for Okinu, she was supposed to let go of her life on the mountain and Become One with the Cosmos—except that she forgot how to do that. Mikami takes Okinu on as an assistant, for 30 yen per day.
81. Beware of Cat
Another early episode highlights both Mikami’s flexible attitude towards the ghosts she’s paid to exorcise and her major concern: money. The episode titled “Ookamitachi no Shigo” (Post-Mortem for the Wolves) deals, despite the title, with bank robbers.
The first scene takes place outside the Kanegura Bank, as two would-be hold-up men drive toward their target. However, a cat wanders into the road, the driver swerves to avoid it, and runs into a lamppost. We next see a bouquet of flowers laid at the lamppost; an indication that the robbers died in the crash. However, we also see their ghosts out on the sidewalk in front of the bank, looking through the window as Mikami meets with the bank manager. The ghosts can’t rest in peace while they have unfinished business on earth; in this case, robbing the bank. Putting up anti-ghost protective charms around the bank would keep away the ghosts, but also drive away customers. Mikami wants to charge the bank ¥100 million to banish the ghosts; the bank manager refuses to pay more than ¥10 million.
Mikami decides to play both ends against the middle. She talks the bank into letting her take part in a robbery prevention drill. Meanwhile, she arranges with the ghosts to help them rob the bank. By carrying out their unfinished business, they can rest in peace; and, because they can’t take the money with them to the afterlife, Mikami would be happy to take it off their hands.
Mikami and company pull off the robbery, taking about ¥300 million in 30 seconds. As the ghosts happily Become One with the Cosmos, Mikami and Yokoshima are chased, and caught, by the bank’s tellers, acting as their own police force. At first, Mikami seems broken up about having to give back the money. All is not lost: back at the bank, Okinu-chan is using one of the computers to transfer ¥1 billion to a Swiss bank account.
The percentage of manga that have been translated into English is relatively small. GS Mikami is one of the titles that hasn’t come over, and it should. Even though it dates from the Nineties, is long (running to some thirty-plus volumes), and may be considered “Old School,” it’s imaginative, well-drawn and, most important, funny.
Jigoku Sensei Nube
This series started appearing in Shonen Jump magazine in 1993, and ran for 6 years as part of the interest in school ghost stories. Artist Takeshi Okano and writer Shou Makura sets the action in the fifth grade of a modern school; the teacher, Meisuke Nueno, is an exorcist and comes from a long line of exorcists. His father got into trouble with one exorcism, and Meisuke saw no choice but to take the demon into himself. This is why he keeps his left hand gloved: his left hand is now a demon’s claw, which he uses to perform magical feats. Apparently, in his school, there’s often a need for magic.
Nueno has run up against most of the standard psychic threats, from spirits raised by kokkuri-san to walking anatomy statues. He’s also had to deal with evil people and mythical beasts; in one early episode, a student is harassed by a kappa, a half-human half-turtle spirit, who was actually only trying to warn the school that it had been built over an unexploded bomb from World War 2.
Yugen Kaisha
I think of this series as “GS Mikami Lite”. It has many of the same ingredients as the manga by Takashi Shiina: the psychic detective agency is run by Ayaka Kisaragi, a vivacious redhead who sees ghostbusting as a relatively cheap and easy way to make money. She has a small stable of assistants, some of whom are children. And, contrary to expectations, the business never seems to turn a profit.
The name translates as Phantom Quest Corporation (but the pronunciation of the kanji is the same as for the more mundane “Limited Corporation”). Four OAV anime episodes were created, and a supplemental episode (known as Part Zero) featured the origins of the series. Beyond dealing with Dracula and an extreme sect of Buddhist monks, the company really only has to deal with one ghost—and he turns out to be one of the good guys.
82. Love Among the Mummies
The episode starts with a night watchman at a museum where an exhibit of artifacts from ancient Egypt is about to open—complete, it seems, with ghost.
We jump to the head of Phantom Quest Corp. meeting with the young and handsome head of the Nakasugi Corporation, underwriters of the exhibition. They then meet separately with Natsuki Ogawa, the young woman who’s curator of the exhibit. She’s concerned about the success of the exhibition, while Nakasugi is more of a sexual predator chasing after various women on his staff. He cancels the night shift installation of the exhibit, then tries to use this to put pressure on Ogawa, but the ghost intervenes.
The ghost is Higashi Narita, a graduate student who unearthed the artifacts as well as Ogawa’s boyfriend at the time of his death. Nakasugi is persistent, however, hinting that Ogawa has to keep him happy to ensure that the exhibition opens. Ayaka, meanwhile, forms a pact with Narita, who sacrificed his life to find the Egyptian ruins. Narita goes after Nakasugi, who’s getting grabby with Ogawa; Nakasugi isn’t killed, but suffers an equally bad fate: he’s caught embezzling from the corporation and fired—which is also bad news for Ayaka and the Phantom Quest Corp, since they won’t get paid.
Vampire Princess Miyu: Himiko Se[104]
Vampire Princess Miyu started out as a series of four OAV episodes produced in 1988. Directed by Toshiki Hirano, these moody and atmospheric episodes tell of a vampiric princess, apparently frozen at age fourteen. She doesn’t behave according to traditional western vampire lore, although she does suck the blood of the living. Her actual task is to search for shinma, “divine demons” who have escaped from the spirit world into the human world. Miyu, accompanied by a companion shinma named Larva, must find and dispel the shinma while a spiritualist, Himiko Se, crosses Miyu’s path in the OAV. (A 26-week television series, also directed by Hirano, was broadcast in Japan in 1997-1998, but its shinma are clearly demonic; only the one appearing in the third OAV episode behaves like a ghost. In this episode, Miyu and Himiko set out in search of a huge antique suit of Japanese armor, a prized family heirloom. This armor, however, has been possessed by one shinma on orders from another, Lemures, who knew Larva. As Himiko tries to exorcise the spirit from the armor, the shinma try to turn Larva’s loyalty away from Miyu. They fail, and Lemures is banished.)
One of the fascinating aspects of the OAV series is Himiko Se, the professional spiritualist. She’s statuesque, sophisticated, and very beautiful; however, much of what we see is a façade. She knows that spiritualism isn’t paying the bills, and seems rather mercenary at times. We also see her in several episodes conducting arcane Buddhist exorcism rituals, with a skill that impresses even Miyu. From beginning to end, Himiko is portrayed as neither good not bad.
Like Miyu herself. In the OAV Miyu explains that her father was a human while her mother was a vampire; she came into her heritage as a shinma-fighter after World War II when her parents died. While Himiko chases after vampires, possessed suits of armor, and a variety of spirit assignments, Miyu’s work is very specific. The overlap occurs only in the OAV series, at the end of which we learn that Miyu and Himiko have met before, years ago…
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Muyo to Roji no Mahouritsu Soudan Jimusho
A more benign bunch of juvenile ghosthunters are featured in Nishi Yoshiyuki’s manga Mu
yo to Roji no Mahouritsu Soudan Jimusho (Muyo & Roji’s Bureau of Supernatural Investigation). There’s a bit of artistic influence of Hino Hideki in Muyo Toru, the shorter senior of the spirit-chasing kids who have their own third-floor office. The diminutive and somewhat creepy Muyo is a “magical lawyer”; this isn’t about exorcism, after all, but about justice, for both the quick and the dead. Roji is the enforcer; tall, thin, friendly-looking, and (in keeping with lawyerly fashion) wears suspenders. His real name is Jiro, but he reverses the letters and calls himself Roji. This duo, which has appeared in Shonen Jump and a sister publication since 2004, has already been discussed in the Spirit Photography chapter; they’ll return with our look at Train Ghosts.
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Looking at GS Mikami above, we note that one of Mikami’s assistants, Meiko Rokudo, has access to a dozen spirit helpers called shikigami. There’s a pretty large body of literature just on these (literally translating the name) ceremonial spirits who do the bidding of onmyouji, shamans who are practitioners of this Shinto-related magic. Most shikigami are invisible, but they manifest to onmyouji in a variety of animal shapes, or as child-sized demons.
Shikigami should not be confused with shinigami, who are the focus of the next manga/anime series:
Yami no Matsuei (Descendants of Darkness)
This manga series first appeared in the girls’ manga magazine Hana to Yume from 1996 to 2002; an anime version appeared in 2000. Officially, the manga by Yoko Matsushita is on hold, and was supposed to start up again in 2010, although the first release in 2010 involved episodes that were first published a decade earlier but have been redrawn.
Shinigami are death spirits, of a type that actually first appeared in western literature; they took root in Japan during the 19th century, although there is some overlap with Shinto shikigami. One aspect of the goddess Izanami, when she appeared to her brother after she was burned to death while giving birth to fire according to the Kojiki (Shinto’s creation mythology), is as a shinigami. Other shinigami-like spirits include Enma, the King of Hell (who puts in an appearance in YuYu Hakusho) and Ryuk, the keeper of the notebook in the manga Death Note by Tsugumi Oba and Takeshi Obata, also the artist of the very different Hikaru no Go.
The shinigami of Yami no Matsuei are very different from any of their classical counterparts. The central actor in this comedy-drama is Asato Tsuzuki, who has been active for seven decades with the Second Division of the afterlife, sorting out proper and improper human deaths. Tsuzuki’s death was apparently proper; he’s a spirit, which doesn’t stop his ravenous sweet tooth. His beat is Japan’s southern island of Kyushu, which happens to be the homeland of manga artist Matsushita.
As part of the series he picks up a partner, a moody teenager named Hisoka Kurosaki. As they chase various evil spirits around Kyushu, sometimes they have a senior/junior relationship akin to Batman and Robin; at times, though, Kurosaki follows his own agenda, since he’s convinced that he was never told the whole truth about his own death.
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Rasetsu no Hana
One of the more recent manga in the ghost-busting genre, Rasetsu no Hana was created by Chika Shiomi, who also has another supernatural manga, Yurara no Tsuki, to her credit; Rasetsu no Hana is actually the sequel to Yurara. Serialized in Hana to Yume, this is the story of yet another young female exorcist; in many ways, it covers familiar ground, but there are a few unique features.
Like Misaki in Vulgar Ghosts’ Daydream, Rasetsu Hyuga is a minor, eighteen years old, yet works full-time as an exorcist. She dropped out of junior high school because she could see spirits—too many of them. But one spirit in particular left its mark on her—literally. The mark resembles a tattoo of a rose on her chest, and the romantic implications are pretty obvious.
This spirit appeared to her when she was fifteen, declaring its love for Rasetsu, and that it would come for her and take her away when she reached adulthood at age twenty—if she did not find love before then. Meanwhile, she seems to be having trouble in that department. Besides being drop-dead beautiful, she’s a bit on the crude side and, like the ghostly detective in Yami no Matsuei, has an insane sweet-tooth. She works in a ghostbusting agency in Tokyo, where “there seem to be more and more evil spirits that need banishing.” The agency director, Hiichiro Amakawa, detects things about the clients by hugging them; this can get a bit awkward, since he’s very bishonen. Another ghostbuster can control people with his voice, and one client, a librarian who can block spirits by casting a water barrier, joins the team after Rasetsu gets him fired from his day job. Here, too, are romantic implications, since this is a young good-looking librarian. This has all the earmarks of the Ghost Hunt cute-meet between Mia and Naru-san.
CHAPTER 25: MODERN GHOSTS
At the opening of the manga Black Bird by Kanoko Sakurakoji, the heroine Misao, having just reached her sixteenth birthday, talks with friends about (no surprise) boys—one of whom asked for Misao’s e-mail address. She refused to give it to him, because she could see the guy was possessed by the spirit of an aborted child.
Misao is hardly the only manga character with the ability to see past the surface into the spirit world, or to be influenced by a spirit. However, Japan’s culture has undergone countless changes since World War II. While there is often consistency between old and new, it’s sometimes very hard to achieve.
A scene from an episode of Jyoji Akiyama’s popular manga of the 1970s, Haguregumo, sums up the distressing state of folk medicine in the mid 1800s: a young girl has been raped and impregnated, and an elderly relative has tied the girl down and is beating on her abdomen in order to induce a miscarriage. The Meiji era brought an emphasis on western medicine, which in turn brought in some new spirit situations.
Life in any nation on Earth is precarious, and Japan is no exception. Miscarriages happen; infants die of illness or accident. The conscious termination of a pregnancy, however, carries with it a degree of guilt that would be hard to understand in the west. In The Life of an Amorous Woman, written in 1686 by Saikaku Ihara (1642-1693), a prostitute has nightmares of being confronted by the ninety-five pregnancies she had terminated. This is about as extreme an example as can be found of tatari, the retribution carried out by the spirit of the fetus. (LaFleur, William R., Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan., 1992. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 152) Those who believe in such things would state that the fetus is sufficiently aware, perhaps by virtue of having lived before and being reincarnated, to understand what has been done and resent the living for unnaturally terminating the soul’s return to life. (p. 172) On the other hand, some Japanese deny the reality of fetal tatari, for a variety of reasons. Tadasu Iizawa, for one, considers it exploitation and compares religious practitioners who make money off of memorializing aborted fetuses to extortionists connected to Japanese organized crime (yakuza). (p. 166)
In any case, this is a type of Japanese ghost we’ve encountered before: resentful at the way it was treated in life, even if that life was in utero, and motivated by a desire for retribution that is not subject to rational thought, much less to negotiation. Misao did well in not giving her e-mail to someone possessed by the spirit of a mizuko—literally, a water child, and a euphemism for an aborted fetus. In modern times, rituals and systems have been developed through which the living can apologize to the dead; these include the erection and maintenance of memorial plaques and statues, and even charitable donations of what would have been “child support.” (pp. 221-222)
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Vampire Princess Miyu
Ten years after their stylish and creepy quartet of OAVs appeared, creators Toshihiro Hirano and Narumi Kakinouchi put together a 26 week TV series based on the teen vampire, her companion Larva, and their battle against shinma—demigods and demons who must be banished from the earth. Overall, the series was less successful than the OAVs, in part because of the need to come up with one shinma after another each week, and also because the series set Miyu in a Japanese high school, rather t
han having her play against the jaded spiritualist Himiko Se.
83. Taxi?
The sixth TV episode begins with Miyu hailing a taxi at night, and asking to be taken to a cemetery. When the cab gets there, however, she’s gone. What started out as a simple joke by Miyu turns serious when her double turns up and starts biting cabdrivers’ necks.
The “ghostly passenger” motif isn’t just a Japanese urban legend. My hometown of Chicago boasts one of the most illustrious of such ghosts: Resurrection Mary.[105] Her story sounds rather similar to this Japanese version:
It was a stormy autumn night, near Aoyama Cemetery, where a taxi driver picked up a poor young girl drenched by the rain. It was dark, so he didn’t get a good look at her face, but she seemed sad and he figured she had been visiting a recently deceased relative or friend. The address she gave was some distance away, and they drove in silence. A good cabbie doesn’t make small talk when picking someone up from a cemetery.
When they arrived at the address, the girl didn’t get out, but whispered for him to wait a bit, while she stared out the window at a second floor apartment. Ten minutes or so passed as she watched, never speaking, never crying; simply observing a solitary figure move about the apartment. Suddenly, the girl asked to be taken to a new address, this one back near the cemetery where he had first picked her up. The rain was heavy, and the driver focused on the road, leaving the girl to her thoughts.
When he arrived at the new address, a modern house in a good neighborhood, the cabbie opened the door and turned around to collect his fare. To his surprise, he found himself staring at an empty back seat, with a puddle where the girl had been sitting moments before. Mouth open, he just sat there staring at the vacant seat, until a knocking on the window shook him from his reverie.
The father of the house, seeing the taxi outside, had calmly walked out bringing with him the exact amount for the fare. He explained that the young girl had been his daughter, who died in a traffic accident some years ago and was buried in Aoyama Cemetery. From time to time, he said, she hailed a cab and, after visiting her old boyfriend’s apartment, asked to be driven home. The father thanked the driver for his troubles, paid him his fare, and sent him on his way.
A Gathering of Spirits: Japan's Ghost Story Tradition: From Folklore and Kabuki to Anime and Manga Page 22
