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

CHAPTER 1: TO GET THINGS STARTED

01. Tell me …

One night a policeman was walking through his usually quiet neighborhood. He was bored, he was almost asleep; his job had become almost automatic. He rounded one corner… and saw someone on the ground a few yards ahead. He ran forward, and saw what appeared to be a woman who had fallen. Maybe the heel of her shoe had given way, or maybe she was drunk; he didn’t care. At least it was a break in the routine.

Are you all right, ma’am? he called out as he approached.

Help me up, please, she said in a soft, very pretty voice. Her long hair hid her face. She reached a hand up; the policeman took her hand and helped her to her feet.

Thank you, the woman said, raising her head. As she did so, the policeman was able to get a better look at her face… but instead he saw that she had no face. Where there should have been eyes, and a nose, and a mouth, there was nothing—just skin stretched smooth and blank as an egg.

The policeman fell back in shock and horror and ran up the street. He didn’t even know where he was running to at first. After a minute, he saw the lights of a convenience store that stayed open all night. He burst into the store, and blurted out to the older man behind the counter what had just happened to him.

The cashier looked at the policeman for a second, smiled, then said, Tell me, officer; did she look… like… this? The cashier waved his hand in front of his own face, and his features vanished, leaving skin stretched smooth and blank as an egg.

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This ghost story, about an encounter with a nopperabou (a faceless ghost), was acted out in the 1994 Studio Ghibli animated movie known as Ponpoko[1]. It also appeared in print, in English, in 1904 in Lafcadio Hearn’s influential ghost story anthology Kwaidan. In fact, this story goes back hundreds of years, and is part of Japan’s long and rich spirit tradition. Stories about Japanese ghosts and other supernatural beings have been written, collected, adapted, reworked, and reinterpreted for centuries, and even the most modern ghost movies, manga (comics) and anime (animation) can refer back to ancient source material.

This book is loosely based on one of these grand and ghostly Japanese traditions, begun back in the Edo period[2]: the hyaku monogatari. Literally the phrase means 100 stories, but the assumption is that these are all ghost stories. Here’s how to play:

Gather some friends together one night, preferably a hot summer night, along with one hundred candles. Once all of the candles are lit, someone tells a ghost story. It can be short or long, historical or recent, frightening or humorous or morally instructive—as this book will show, Japanese ghost stories come in all sorts of flavors. When the first story ends, the storyteller blows out a candle. Then the next person tells a story, blows out a candle, and so on.

By the time the room is down to two or three lit candles, after several hours of ghost stories, everyone’s nerves should be on edge. When the last person finishes the last story and blows out the last candle, plunging the room into blackness, some say that a ghost, invisible in the candlelight, will appear. Others suggest that the party-goers count off in the pitch-black room—and one extra voice will answer.

My favorite thing about summer, writes Satsuki Igarashi, one of the cartoonists of the highly successful CLAMP manga collective, is the ghost stories… . In fact, during summer breaks I would also watch a lot of afternoon TV, and the gossip shows often featured horror stories.[3] Unlike in America, where ghost stories are often told in the autumn around Halloween, ghost stories in Japan are associated with summer for several reasons, and we’ll look at them in greater detail later. For now, let’s just say a major reason is because of the weather; Japan, except for the northernmost island of Hokkaido, has a tropical or semi-tropical climate. The summers get very mushi-atsui (humid and hot), and ghost stories were found long ago to be an effective way to send much-needed chills up and down one’s spine.

Prepare for a sampling of Japanese ghosts and spirits, from sources that include the world’s oldest novel, the urban legends of contemporary Japanese schoolchildren, movies both classic and modern, anime, manga, and more. Some of the ghost stories will be actual ghost stories, designed to frighten and shock; sometimes, however, ghosts will appear in unlikely places—in romantic comedies, in sports anime, in domestic dramas, in school stories…

First, though, we have to understand the ground-rules for dealing with the reality of spirits in Japan, especially the fact that reality itself is divided into the human world and the spirit world.

CHAPTER 2: THAT’S THE SPIRIT

T. R. Reid described the years he and his family lived in Tokyo while he was Asian Bureau Chief for the Washington Post in his book Confucius Lives Next Door. The title referred not just to the sage of China who lived 500 years before Christ, but also to the next door neighbors of the Reids, who embodied so many Confucian virtues. They were an elderly couple, the Matsudas, and one day Mrs. Matsuda passed away at age 78. As Reid placed flowers on the makeshift altar that had been erected in the Matsuda living room, Mr. Matsuda turned to a photograph of his late wife and told it matter-of-factly, Cho-Cho, it’s Reid-san.[4]

It’s tempting for a western reader in the 21st century to dismiss this scene as the sentimental gesture of an elderly widower. Doing this, however, misses the point. Mr. Matsuda wasn’t being sentimental, or senile, or ironic. He spoke to the picture of his wife in order to communicate with the spirit of his late wife; nothing more, nothing less.

This motif pops up often in Japan’s pop culture, and not always as practiced by elderly widowers. In one scene in the anime Princess Nine, a TV series about an elite girls’ high school that creates a baseball team to challenge the boys’ high schools, we see the girls’ star pitcher, fifteen-year-old Ryo Hayakawa, stopping before going to school to tell her father what’s been happening. It doesn’t matter that her father’s been dead for ten years; she still communicates with him through the Buddhist altar set up in the Hayakawa home (as it is in so many Japanese homes). In Ouran High School Host Club, the comic manga/anime by Bisco Hatori, heroine Haruhi Fujioka, another first-year high school student, consults with her dead mother via the altar in her apartment.

Similarly, in the romantic comedy manga Ai Yori Aoshi by Kou Fumizuki, and its anime version, the main character, Kaoru Hanabishi, has decided to take the girl he loves, Aoi-chan, to meet his mother. He picks up flowers, incense, and food, and takes them to a cemetery. He places everything in front of his mother’s tombstone and matter-of-factly introduces Aoi to his mother as the girl who has come to mean everything in his life. Aoi-chan follows up on this, telling Kaoru’s mother about her feelings for her son.

Kaoru, by the way, is a college junior majoring in pre-Law when we meet him; it’s hard to imagine anyone more prosaic and less given to communing with spirits. Yet Kaoru and Ryo and Haruhi do not address their dead parents half-heartedly or ironically. They expect to be heard and understood in the next world.

This kind of spirit communication reflects Japan’s unique spiritual heritage, which is a blend of two different faiths. First came Shinto, which literally means the path of the gods. This animistic (based on spirits) religion has been traced back to at least the fifth century B. C. E. and has come to define Japan and its people. Shinto’s creation mythology, the Kojiki, attributed the creation of the universe to two divine sibling gods, Izanagi and Izanami; they gave birth to, among other things, the sun goddess Amaterasu, who in turn was regarded as having created the Japanese people. For much of Japan’s history, an article of faith in Shinto was that the line of Japanese emperors was descended from Amaterasu herself; this was abandoned only after Japan lost World War II and the American Occupation redefined the emperor as 100 per cent mortal.

Most important for this book, however, is Shinto’s belief in kami, which can be translated as either gods or spirits. It would be impossible to list all of the possible kami, since they cover all of creation; they are everywhere and in everything, making Shinto a literally all-encompassing religion. Some kami are guardian spirits of particular locations, from mountains and rivers to islands to vacant lots; some kami are associated with broader geographical areas or certain warrior clans; some kami are highly abstract, associated with the natural world or ideals such as beauty and even evil (Shinto could not imagine evil as having been the result of a separate creation).

This last type of association may be why the 1997 Studio Ghibli animated film Mononoke-hime (Princess Mononoke) was considered almost incomprehensible when it was dubbed into English as part of a deal to bring the anime of director Hayao Miyazaki to America. That deal never anticipated a film populated by giant boar kami, giant wolf kami, little potato-headed human-like kami, and the shishigami, the spirit that governs the entire natural world.

Complementing Shinto in Japan is its embrace of Buddhism; a majority of Japanese (84% according to one source) claim to believe in both religions at once. This is possible because the two faiths aren’t mutually exclusive, and one point where they overlap is in the realm of the spirits.

Buddhism arrived in Japan by way of China, where a somewhat unorthodox form of Buddhism (unorthodox according to the traditional Buddhism of India, at any rate), known as Chan Buddhism, later traveled to Japan by way of Korea. With a slight linguistic shift, Chan became Zen in Japan. However, just as America can accommodate several forms of Christianity, Japan now houses several forms of Buddhism, ranging from the homespun Jodo Shinshu or Pure Land sect to the Soka Gakkai (whose liturgy at times seems a bit too close to show biz). Whatever the sect, Japanese Buddhists interpret Shinto in Buddhist terms and vice versa, with the assortment of buddhas and bodhisattvas (saints) viewed as another form of kami. This history hasn’t always been one of peace and cooperation, and at times some Japanese Buddhist sects have been more militant than others, but in general Japanese Buddhists recognize the need for Shinto to underlie all aspects of Japanese society, providing a sense of history, identity, and continuity.

When it comes to the afterlife and the possibility of ghostly activity on earth, neither Shinto nor Buddhism claim a single authoritative answer. Shinto speaks of the High Plain of Heaven and of an unclean underworld, but doesn’t go into much more detail than that. Buddhist interpretations of the afterlife vary from sect to sect and change over time, but among the Buddhist sects who preach an afterlife, they maintain that both heaven and hell are temporary. Spirits of people are born and die and are reborn on earth constantly, in a process leading ultimately to the purest of spirit, divorced from the temptations and corruptions of the physical world. Hell may be necessary to purge away some kinds of corruption, while Heaven may be a reward for work well done in one’s past life, but the cycle still goes on.

Both Shinto and Buddhism recognize the place of honor given to one’s ancestors, and encourage their veneration as, at the least, a matter of simple respect. It’s also a practical consideration; if your ancestors didn’t give birth to your parents, who gave birth to you, where would you be today? In Buddhist terms, this is part of karma, the recognition that everything that happens on earth was caused by certain events, and that every event has consequences. Your ancestors caused you to be born here and now, just as you will cause your descendants to be born; they in turn will regard you as an ancestor worthy of veneration.

In an atmosphere such as Japan’s, in which natural spirits can even be found amid the skyscrapers of downtown Tokyo, and where many homes have their own Buddhist altar or Shinto god-shelf, it should be no surprise that spirits are presumed to visit the human world. And when they come to visit from the afterlife, as they do every year, they come to party.

CHAPTER 3: SHALL WE DANCE

One principal reason that ghost stories in Japan are associated with summer is the annual summer celebration of the return of the spirits of the departed to earth. It’s a holiday, complete with carnival atmosphere, refreshments, fireworks, music—and dancing. The centerpiece of the festival is the Bon Odori, a community dance.

02. My Mother, the Hungry Ghost

According to legend, Bon Odori originated when Maudgalyayana, a disciple of the Buddha, had a vision of his dead mother indulging her own selfishness in the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, gorging herself continuously but never satisfying her hunger.[5] (In this story, any food one touches in this cursed realm bursts into flame before it can be eaten.) Greatly disturbed, he went to the Buddha and asked how he could release his mother from her selfish attachment. The Buddha advised his disciple to perform a charitable act in memory of his mother. The disciple gave food to the poor and thus saw his mother’s release from the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. He also began to see the many sacrifices that she had made for him in her life—sacrifices for which she had tried to compensate as a Hungry Ghost. Maudgalyayana, happy because of his mother’s release after death and grateful for his mother’s kindness toward him in life, danced with joy. From this dance of joy comes Bon Odori or the Bon Dance, a time in which the ancestors and their sacrifices are remembered and appreciated.[6]

Of course, the dead celebrated in Obon aren’t exclusively parents or grandparents. Parents revisit dead children, and widows and widowers spend time again with dead spouses.[7]

Today Obon festival participants continue the old custom as they dance in traditional Japanese dress, including yukata (cotton kimono made for Japan’s sweltering summers) and happi coats (short jackets). The dances may also include the use of fans, straw hats, and even local additions, such as castanets in southern California.

As the festival ends, in some places paper lanterns are painted with the names of the deceased; the lanterns are then set adrift in a river or seacoast,[8] to guide the ancestor back to the land of the dead until next year. Meanwhile, it’s always possible to communicate with the deceased through praying at the altar that is still kept in many homes.

The Obon festival usually occurs in August, because it’s supposed to coincide with the seventh day of the seventh month. So why August? August is the eighth month—of the Gregorian calendar. Until 1873, Japan used the Chinese lunar calendar, in which New Year’s Day is movable, and falls during the thirty days after January 20, based on the first new moon after the sun enters Aquarius. However, as part of Japan’s decision to modernize during the Meiji era (1868-1912), Japan adopted the medieval calendar created by Pope Gregory, even though lunar dates are sometimes still observed.

The seven-seven lunar date also coincides with a Chinese festival, commemorating the legendary Weaver, granddaughter of the King and Queen of Heaven, who had fallen in love with a mortal cowherd. They were transfigured into stars (known in modern astronomy as Altair and Vega), which from Earth seem close but are separated by the Milky Way and only able to draw close to each other on one day each year—the seventh day of the seventh month.[9] Hence the holiday’s other name: the Star Festival, or Tanabata.

Much as early Christianity may have borrowed pagan festivals and made them over into official Church-sanctioned holidays, there is more than a coincidental similarity between the Chinese Double Seven holiday and the Japanese Buddhist Obon celebration. Both, after all, celebrate the very brief time each year that Heaven meets Earth, and those who are dead return to the land of the living—in spirit, at least. In Japan, at any rate, that time is summer, and consequently a lot of ghost stories take place during the warm weather, when spirits are presumed to be traveling the land.

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For an example of what can go wrong if the proper rites aren’t observed, look at Bleach, a manga by Noriaki Tite Kubo, which inspired an anime popular enough to inspire in turn (among other spinoffs) a live musical. Its teenaged hero, Ichigo Kurosaki, sees dead people, and that’s the opening hook that gets him involved with the Soul Society, but all the subsequent business of Hollows and Reapers are basically window dressing. This is a case of using a ghost story to communicate to the audience what is considered important by the larger society—in this case, by Japanese society.

03. Don’t forget me

Look at the story-arc in Bleach involving Sora and Orihime. First of all, if you’re Japanese, the name Orihime is loaded. I mentioned Obon commemorating the one day a year when the mortal who loved a goddess could be with her, while they spend the rest of the year as stars in the sky separated by the Milky Way. The goddess’s name in Japan was Orihime, so, of all the names that the modern schoolgirl character could have been given, this was a meaningful choice.

Sora was her older brother until he was killed in a hit-and-run. Orihime would pray for his soul daily at the Buddhist altar in their home. This gave Sora peace, knowing that she still remembered him. Gradually, though, there were other demands on Orihime’s time, her prayers were less consistent, and Sora became jealous, eventually transforming into a serpentine monster. It was only when Orihime finally told her brother that she still cared for him, even though they had quarreled on his last day on earth, that—without any intervention from Ichigo or anyone from the Soul Society—Sora was able to abandon his jealousy and stop being a monster. This isn’t even a subtle message; it reminds the audience not to abandon the old ways, since the spirits of the dead could take offense and cause problems in this world.

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Rumiko Takahashi uses an Obon celebration in her romantic comedy manga Mezon Ikkoku to put a comic twist on the legend of Okiku and the plates (we’ll hear more about this famous ghost in a later chapter).

An early episode of Pokemon has the main character (Ash in America, Satoshi in Japan) hang around home long enough to attend a local festival. However, it’s more than just a festival. To those in the know, it’s clearly an Obon dance.

Akachan to Boku, a manga by Marimo Ragawa published in English as Baby and Me, is an unlikely manga whose audience is teenaged girls, since there’s hardly a female character in it that isn’t in nursery school. The series found a home in Japan in Hana to Yume (Flowers and Dreams), a girls’ manga magazine, and has been animated for television by Studio Pierrot in a rare Japanese-Italian co-production. The English version of the manga appeared in Shojo Beat magazine and in paperback anthologies published by VIZ.

It’s the story of the Enoki family: widowed salaryman Harumi Enoki, his older son (ten years old when the series starts) Takuya, and Takuya’s toddler brother Minoru. Still living in the shadow of the death of Harumi’s wife, they muddle through as best they can. The focus is on Takuya, growing up and taking care of his baby brother, being something of a surrogate mother as well as a big brother.

Even this idyllic family tale isn’t ghost-free; in this case, the ghost is not that of the boys’ late mother. While the family is on summer vacation, they spend a weekend at an old traditional inn with an onsen (hot springs). But this story involves a special kind of ghost; we’ll look at it later.

04. Don’t shoot!

The Patlabor anime series started in 1988, with a series of direct-to-video episodes created by a group that included manga artist Masami Yuuki and anime director Mamoru Oshii. The title is a compressed version of the words patrol labor, which refers to the machine suits worn by members of a special police unit in the future.

A later broadcast anime series based one episode on stories of the haunting of a rural police training camp, and set that episode in the summer, when other trainees would be away on break and the one remaining squad would have to cope with a large, empty facility. Ghostly things start happening that seem to match up with legends about a training mishap a few years earlier. It’s said that cadets were sparring, while wearing the Patlabor suits (think of the machine that Ripley wore in Aliens, except twenty feet tall). One Patlabor was knocked down, and its weapon went off accidentally. Even though it was an oversized paintball gun, the story goes that the pellet was enough to kill a spectator, a beautiful young woman. Her ghost is seen through windows, and is heard to say, Don’t shoot! In addition, the bath (the size of a small swimming pool) turns red; it looks like blood, but later it’s found to have the chemical composition of the dye used in paintballs.

In the end, the stories about the dead girl turn out to be just that: stories. The unit’s officers had devised the elaborate scheme about a ghost as a way to impress the troops, who were getting over-eager and therefore careless, with the need to be more cautious when using their suits. It certainly worked: getting the troops caught up in unearthly voices and inexplicable mysteries certainly made a deeper impression than any number of safety lectures would have.

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Not every attempt to create a ghost works so well. Early in the popular anime series Fullmetal Alchemist, based on a manga by Hiromu Arakawa, the Elric brothers run into an apparent case of a cemetery haunting, on a holiday similar to Obon.

05. Blue Roses

Early in their search for the Philosopher’s Stone, the legendary amplifier of alchemical processes, Edward Elric (who lost two limbs to alchemy) and his younger brother Alphonse (who lost his entire body, and whose soul is now anchored in a suit of armor) traveled to a village in search of Majihal, an alchemist knowledgeable about the Philosopher’s Stone. They arrive at the village on the eve of a festival celebrating the dead. However, this village has some supernatural problems. Decades ago, Karin, a beautiful woman from a neighboring village famous for cultivating a rare strain of blue roses, tried to drive a cart down a washed-out road and slid to her death. Her ghost (or perhaps zombie) has recently been seen near the town cemetery.

The truth is actually less hopeful for the Elric brothers. Majihal has had no luck in bringing Karin’s spirit back; he had been trying to do so in order to embed it in the life-sized dolls he had built to commemorate Karin and her beauty; people see these dolls near the cemetery at night. The irony was that alchemy couldn’t retrieve Karin’s spirit anyway, because Karin is alive. She was not killed in the carriage accident years before but suffered a memory loss. Majihal failed to recognize her even though she was alive and nearby, because she had aged and was no longer the youthful beauty he had fallen in love with. Majihal attempted to kill Ed for revealing these inconvenient truths, but the weapon slipped and killed Majihal instead.

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Rumiko Takahashi has long been meticulous in structuring not only her plotlines, but also in dressing the sets, with cues referring to the time of year as well as events meaningful to the Japanese psyche. These hints are often overlooked in the west, but are especially important to understanding the ghostly plot of one episode of the anime version of her popular manga InuYasha, Soul Piper & the Mischievous Little Soul.

06. I’m running away!

During this episode of a series which mostly takes place in Japan’s feudal past, high school student Kagome Higurashi and the dog-demon Inuyasha are in the modern world for a while during the summer. Kagome’s little brother Sota is seen carrying a big Get Well present. One of his school friends, a boy named Satoru, was caught in an apartment fire six months ago but is still comatose and hasn’t fully recovered from smoke inhalation. That’s bad enough, but medical equipment in his hospital room keeps breaking down and his school friends are afraid to visit him because they think he is cursed somehow. Not one to believe in curses (even though he’s on a first-name basis with the demon Inuyasha), Sota wants to visit Satoru, but he isn’t old enough to ride the train by himself; Kagome agrees to take him after school.

While they are at the hospital, Kagome notices a spooky little girl dressed in a down vest (unusual clothing for summer) lurking around the hospital. Earlier, the same girl was seen attacking a group of children playing with fireworks. Fireworks may mean Independence Day in the United States, but in Japan they carry a very different, specific meaning: summer festivals and Obon.

Kagome tries to befriend the little girl, but the child, whose name is Mayu, doesn’t want anything to do with her. When they reach Satoru’s room, his fatigued single mother is sitting by his side.