Her explanation is a bit complicated. On the one day Taeko caught a cold and stayed home from school, Rie was invited to join the girls’ volleyball team. Before this, most of the school apparently avoided speaking to Taeko and Rie, suspecting that they were “too close” and “sick” (meaning, they were suspected of being lesbians). Taeko was fond of holding Rie’s hand, however, and Rie didn’t mind at first. By being on the volleyball team, Rie tells Muyo and Rouji, “suddenly my world changed.” She got more involved in sports and other students, and consequently had less time for Taeko, who had no other friends. Rie didn’t want to let down the team, but Taeko argues one day on the train platform, rather pathetically, that Rie is her only friend. During the argument Taeko fell backward off the platform, into the path of an oncoming train.
Although Taeko has been repeatedly to Rie’s grave, she refuses to step onto Platform 5. Yet this is exactly what Muyo wants her to do, preferably at two in the morning. While the two ghostbusters are intercepted by police (and have to subdue them), Taeko confronts the spirit on Platform 5—which appears to be a large centipede-like creature. Muyo diagnoses the spirit as a jibakurei made up of the hatred and sorrow of all of the train death victims of that station. He opens a portal to Hell to swallow up the jibakurei; however, Rie is still determined to try to save her friend, whose death she still feels she could have averted. Rie is even willing to be pulled into Hell with her friend, but Taeko at the last tells her, “You can’t, Rie, but I’m happy; thank you.” And after having this chance to hold Rie’s hand one last time, Taeko’s ghost is pulled into the underworld. Specifically, Muyo announces that the lord of the underworld has indeed sent Taeko to the River Sanzu rather than directly to Hell. (This more satisfactory resolution is the way stories in this series usually end up.)
As an epilogue, Rie tries to meet with the psychic detectives again to thank them, but they avoid her; it seems that they have a rule never to meet with a former client, for fear of getting the person involved with other spirits. Rie leaves a note anyway, thanking them on behalf of herself and “Taeko, who should be in Heaven by now.”
Even though this series ran in Shonen Jump, a magazine aimed at adolescent boys, and as a result stresses action, this story sets the tenor of the entire series by mixing magic spells with compassion. Rie had been properly penitent and tried repeatedly to apologize to Taeko’s spirit for breaking her promise of lifelong friendship. However, Taeko’s spirit was overwhelmed and subsumed into the centipede-like jibakurei. Once the other spirits had been peeled away, Taeko was able to speak with Rie directly. This episode also shows the reader what disasters could have been avoided if Rei had thought more about Taeko, and tried to balance the two aspects of her new life—the team and her friend—instead of going from one to the other.
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The Gakkou no Kaidan anime series has its own connection to a railroad ghost, although it starts out and ends up in a taxicab.
It’s two in the morning on a rainy night, at a railroad crossing on a lonely country road. A taxi driver is thinking of going home and calling it a night. Suddenly, a type we’re familiar with by now appears directly in front of the cab: a pale-skinned woman whose long black hair is hanging in front of her face. The taxi driver jams on the brakes and goes out to check on the woman he’s sure he hit. But there’s nobody in front of the cab. When he gets back behind the wheel, the woman is sitting in the back seat. The title of the episode: “The ghost photograph that takes lives: The Railroad crossing of evil.”
Once it’s established (see chapter 20 on spirit photography) that this particular crossing is haunted, the fifth grade student named Leo notices that an offering has been made there: a vase of flowers, rice balls and a juice box have been set up on the spot by, as it turns out, the victim’s mother.
CHAPTER 28: LIVING DOLLS
In Japanese, a doll is called ningyo (人形), which means human-shaped. A listing of all the kinds of dolls that were ever used in Japanese society would be a separate book. They are children’s playthings, and mementos of visits to temples or other pilgrimage sites, funeral dolls, cell phone strap trinkets, and the legless Daruma dolls (named for Bodhidharma, who created the Zen sect of Buddhism and was said to have meditated until his limbs fell off). Dolls have their own holiday: the Hinamatsuri (Doll Festival, also known as Girls’ Day), celebrated on March 3; the centerpiece is a group of dolls representing the Emperor, Empress, and the imperial court of the Heian period.
There were also dolls which were not mere playthings. During the Heian period dolls began to be used for religious purposes, by taking on the sins of the person they represented. During the past one thousand years, other dolls have served other, less beneficial purposes, and they figure as well in Japanese stories of the supernatural—on both the good and evil sides of the equation. (These dolls, by the way, go beyond those who get possessed according to legend, such as the “visible boy” in classrooms and the Ninomiya statue that used to be in front of every school.)
91. Minnie
Volume two of the manga Ghost Hunt is much more chilling than the first, with a little girl and her doll at the center of poltergeist activity. Exorcisms don’t seem to work, and the mystery doesn’t begin to unravel until Naru uncovers the history of the house: six children under the age of ten had died in connection with that house. The question is, where to search for the ghost: in the house, in the child named Ayami who lives there now, or in Minnie her doll?
The doll is the center of Ayami’s attention, and supposedly has told the girl a number of strange things. Minnie told her that she shouldn’t repeat what she says to anyone or else she’ll hurt Ayami; that her mother is an evil witch and her father is the witch’s servant; that the doll has her own servants, consisting of the ghosts of children about the same age as Ayami.
It turns out that one little girl disappeared years before the present house was built, only to turn up dead months later. The girl’s mother in her grief threw herself down a well; the new house was built over the well, but the mother’s spirit continued menacing other children roughly the same age as her dead child. Searching for her own child, she caused the other deaths of those about the same age. In the end, Naru succeeds where the exorcists can’t by creating a doll; specifically, a hitogata. Using a different pronunciation for the same kanji that make up the word “doll” (the symbols for ‘human’ and ‘shape’), the hitogata is a small wooden doll with a piece of paper attached; the paper bears the name and age of the person needing protection[107]—in this case, Tomiko, the daughter of Hiro Oshima, the ghost of the grieving mother who committed suicide. By uniting Hiro’s ghost with the spirit of her dead daughter in the hitogata, this not only caused the mother to stop attracting other children’s spirits, but allowed those spirits she’d already trapped to move on as well.
One interesting parallel between Ghost Hunt and Lagoon Engine: in both, getting through to the spirit world involves several different methods. First, there’s a process of negotiation and persuasion, which has to give way to force when all else fails. The approaches are described in Ghost Hunt as “jōrei” and “jorei.” The manga’s celebrity exorcist Masako Hara explains the distinction: “Let’s say you know someone who is a troublemaker. Jōrei would be to try to talk to them so that they could reform… Jorei would be to just kill them mercilessly.” Hara feels too much compassion to perform jorei, since “humans and spirits are the same in her eyes.” The exorcism of Minnie is thus left to John Brown, the Catholic from Australia.
This creates a double-distancing between the intended reader (teen Japanese girls) and violence, even psychic violence, since the exorcism is conducted by someone who may be a handsome blond hunk, but is also of an alien race and faith, and it doesn’t work as well as the creation of the hitogata. Once again, in the character of Hara, who always appears in traditional kimono, to be a young, quintessentially Japanese girl (Yamato nadeshiko) is to be yasashii (gentle, kind and compassionate), but being male is defin
ed as being effective.
Hitogata are also used in a major case in books 4 & 5 of Ghost Hunt (see the story “I am not a dog” in the “School Spirits” chapter). A high school is flooded with various psychic problems, from poltergeists setting fires to ravenous dog spirits. It eventually becomes clear that all the supernatural activity started with the suicide of a student, named Sakauchi. However, his grudge-holding ghost would not have been enough to cause all of the problems. Naru, Mai and the others find out that Sakauchi was driven to suicide by an especially abusive administrator named Matsuyama. As a result, an interest grew among the students in kokkuri-san for the sole purpose of cursing Matsuyama to death. All that this activity accomplished, however, was to summon a wide variety of malevolent spirits who set about devouring each other; if left unchecked, the surviving spirit would be so large and so evil as to pose a major threat.
Unable to attack all of the spirits in the school at once, Naru decides to turn the evil spirits against the students who summoned them by destroying the students; actually, by fashioning hitogata for the students and letting the spirits attack them. When this happens (and we can tell because the wooden dolls are broken into splinters), the school is cleansed.
How did Naru suspect the use of kokkuri-san? He noticed, and mentioned to the others, that the students at this school, under the heavy disciplinary hand of Matsuyama, didn’t show even the slightest sign of rebellion. Most Japanese high schools have a dress code but don’t insist on it; boys’ tunics are sometimes open at the collar, girls wear excessively baggy knee-socks that bunch up around their ankles, students dye their hair in the bizarre colors of anime characters. Students can thus push at the edge of the rules without actually breaking them, letting off steam and keeping the all-important harmony (wa). At this school, however, Matsuyama was so heavy-handed in his scorn of psychic phenomena, dismissing anyone who believed in it as escapists and the young exorcists of Shibuya Psychic Research as con-artists, that the students went to extremes, and came close to bringing disaster to their school. Averting disaster only cost a few wooden dolls.
Mystical Detective Loki Ragnarok
The provenance of the manga Matantei Roki Ragunaroku (Demon Detective Loki Ragnarok), which ran from 1999 to 2004, is a bit jumbled, since, after its serialization began in GanGan Comics, the first seven tankobon were published by Blade. The manga, by Sakura Kinoshita, was picked up by Blade magazine, and was released in a total of twelve volumes. It was animated in a 26-episode series by Studio Deen, with an occasionally edgy style. “Edgy” in this case means evoking video “snow”, simulated hand-held camera shakiness, and other techniques of current Japanese horror movies (many of which were developed originally for Italian horror movies by directors like Dominic Argento and Mario Bava). Overall, though, the look of the series is mainstream anime.
The title suggests the central plot: the action centers on the Norse god Loki, whose mischief in this story got him into trouble once too often; he was banished from Valhalla to Earth in the body of a young boy, but with all his wits intact. Charged with ridding the earth of evil spirits, he and his servant Yamino set up the Enjaku “psychic detective agency” to make it easier to find them. He also quickly finds a partner in Mayura Daidouji, a high school student and daughter of a Shinto priest. Mayura loves mysteries and the occult; however, she has no sixth sense at all, neither she nor her father can see spirits, and she tends to get in Loki’s way as often as not.
92. The Lonely Doll
In her first case with Loki (also the first episode in the anime series), she meets a child’s doll which has come to life. Her first visit to a reputedly haunted house introduces her to the doll, which laughs, calls Mayura “o-neesan” (big sister), then launches itself at Mayura. Even though the doll is fueled by a vengeful spirit, Mayura actually imagines herself and the possessed doll as potential media darlings. The doll was one of the few items that survived a fire twenty years before; however, not knowing about the fire, it feels abandoned and consequently lashes out at people. It’s about to attack Mayura, accusing her of abandoning the doll and levitating knives and furniture against the girl, when Loki intervenes. After telling the doll about the fire, he puts an enchanted protective bracelet on Mayura and removes the vengeful spirit by having Mayura hold the doll. (We know the doll has lost its vengeful nature by one of the oldest conventions in Japanese pop culture: the doll, despite being a doll, sheds a tear.) In this case, among many others, simple compassion expressed through “skinship” is all that is necessary for the bitter spirit inside the doll to change and move on.
It’s interesting to note that, the first time we see the doll, during an attempted exorcism, a few of its synthetic hairs have strayed in front of its face. A few hairs are hardly enough to make the doll look like Oiwa of Yotsuya Kaidan or like Sadako in Ringu, but the hint is certainly there for the savvy viewer. The doll indeed turns out to be a jibakurei—a vengeful spirit—despite its blonde hair and frilly dress.
Gakkou no Kaidan
Two episodes of this series, based on a collection of rumors and ghost stories from contemporary Japanese schoolchildren, feature two very different dolls.
93. Doll of Return
It’s common for schools, as part of their science curriculum, to keep animals as pets. It’s less common for one person to repeatedly volunteer to take care of the animals; the ideal in Japanese education is to give everyone the chance to experience an activity. Satsuki finds that her classmate Hajime has “volunteered” her to tend to the animals, over the objections of the animals’ perennial caretaker, an otherwise shy and unassuming girl named Imai. Their teacher settles things by saying that both Satsuki and Imai need to tend the animals together.
In time a litter of rabbits is born, increasing the rabbit population to six; however, one day, the students notice that a seventh rabbit is in the pen. Imai names it Shirotabi (White Stockings), after a previous rabbit who had died and was buried in the improvised pet cemetery behind the school. What nobody realizes until later is that the new rabbit isn’t just a stray who wandered in from the woods; this is the original Shirotabi, brought back to life by Imai with the aid of an enchanted doll buried with the rabbit. Unfortunately, at night, Shirotabi turns into a demonic rabbit bigger than a human, a monster more like the raptors in Jurassic Park than a rabbit. It breaks out of its pen, kills all of the other rabbits (and a couple of people), then chases the children (including Imai) who were trying to find out what was happening. In this case, seeing the damage she’s caused just because she wanted her friend back, Imai is able to reverse the curse.
In the end, the teacher brings the class some new rabbits from a local farm; descendants of the original Shirotabi, as it turns out. The teacher explains, in a simultaneously scientific and Buddhist manner, that a time comes when everything must die, and life is passed on to the next generation; “it’s been like this for hundreds of millions of years.” However, Imai, an otherwise friendless and very forgettable girl, learns this lesson the hard way. She regarded Shirotabi as her only friend, and crafted the doll to resurrect the rabbit because she missed him. This episode suggests that Imai will now be able to reach out to her classmates, perhaps through her abilities with a sewing needle to stitch together cute little keychain dolls.
94. Mary
The teaser opening is on a rainy night at the city garbage dump. Among the few identifiable bits of refuse is a blonde doll in a frilly pink dress and a red hair ribbon. Given the progress of the series, it’s not surprising when the doll opens its eyes…
We next see the doll sitting on top of a trashcan where the children are walking home from school. Keiichiro asks his sister if they can take the doll with them; she says that boys aren’t supposed to be interested in dolls. However, that night, the doll shows up in their home by the front door; Satsuki assumes her brother brought it in anyway. After all, it’s just a doll, and couldn’t have entered by itself.
Things start to escalate late that night; Mary
starts making phone calls to Satsuki. The doll also calls her the next day at school, first at the school office, then through Leo’s cell phone. The children are then called out of school on a real emergency: their father is in the emergency room of a hospital. It’s nothing serious, but he’ll be there overnight. When they find the doll in the hospital, Satsuki’s teacher takes the doll to a temple with a reputation for housing dolls of those who have died. They hope that the temple will cancel out whatever evil spirit possesses the doll.
However, as soon as they get back home, Mary’s phone calls start up again. Hajime takes Satsuki and Keiichi to an old abandoned martial arts dojo. While Hajime takes Keiichi to an outhouse, Mary reappears, curtsies to Satsuki, and suggests that they play. Other ghostly dolls start appearing, suggesting that they do to Satsuki what was done to them, which involved losing limbs, or eyes, or getting run over. Before the torture can start, a handkerchief falls out of Satsuki’s pocket. Satsuki had used the handkerchief to clean a smudge of dirt off of Mary’s face, before the doll started harassing the family. Mary suddenly announces the game is over, that she’ll keep the handkerchief as a souvenir, and disappears.
While we’ve already seen magical or ceremonial dolls like the hitogata which are supposed to take on human attributes, Mary was literally just a child’s plaything. In theory, she wasn’t supposed to have any supernatural powers at all. However, such things can happen—in the pop culture, anyway. In the second feature anime based on Osamu Tezuka’s manga character Unico, titled Unico on Magic Island, the title character, a magical baby unicorn, encounters a wooden marionette come to life. The marionette, named Kuruku, was maltreated and ultimately just thrown away. This ill treatment inspired in Kuruku hatred toward all of humankind; it sought dark magic with a desire to turn people into puppets for his amusement. The only thing that undoes Kuruku’s hatred is Unico’s offer of friendship; once he has returned to being just a marionette, he is found by the young girl at the center of the story. She has already been established as kind and compassionate, so we know that history will not repeat itself.
A Gathering of Spirits: Japan's Ghost Story Tradition: From Folklore and Kabuki to Anime and Manga Page 24
