A Gathering of Spirits: Japan's Ghost Story Tradition: From Folklore and Kabuki to Anime and Manga (13 page)

The central portion of the narrative depicts the tragic and unfortunate chain of events which lead to the formation of this formidable monster and the generational curse which follows. Those in the present merely experience the ghostly results of the far more colorful past.

 36. Hello Kitty

A lesser-known and very different ghost-cat movie worth mentioning is
Kuroneko
(Black
Cat)
[46]
, a 1968 film written and directed by Kaneto Shindou. The story is fairly straightforward: during feudal times, a woman and her son’s wife are tending the family farm while the son is off fighting in a war. This leaves them vulnerable: no sooner does the film begin when a band of twenty ragtag soldiers take over the house, eat all the food, rape the women and burn down the house. Once the fire has died down, we see a black cat licking at the blood on the neck of the (relatively unmarked) corpses.

The spirits of the women and the cat merge; the women become vengeful ghosts, luring samurai to their deaths in their hut in the forest, which now appears to be a luxurious mansion. The samurai, all of them low-class louts who have been elevated in rank because of the war, expect a night of pleasure and are found in the morning with their throats ripped out by some wild beast. One fearless samurai is sent to investigate, and, wouldn’t you know it, he’s the son/husband of the two ghosts. His wife, Shige, not only recognizes him, but abandons her desire to kill all samurai, and swears to enslave herself to the Lord of the Underworld if she could take bodily form again and spend seven days with her husband. The mother’s vengeance, however, is not so easily stopped.

Watching this film reveals that the director has completely internalized manga into his narrative style. Most of the scenes are freeze-frame reaction shots or establishing looks at locations. Like manga, the movie is in black and white. Movement usually takes place within the frame of vision, without characters entering or leaving the scene. Several times in the film, a ghost is shown somersaulting through the air against a black background, in an imitation of the “time-lapse photography” way of drawing certain manga action scenes. It scans very much like a moving comic book, and makes
Kuroneko
one of the strongest statements that manga would become a dominant part of Japanese popular culture.

 37. “So you were a kitten?”

There’s a brief incident at the beginning of “The Heaven to Which You Will Someday Return,” the first chapter of the one-volume manga
Heaven’s
Will
by Satoru Takamiya. Mikuzu Sudou can see spirits, but has been generally overwhelmed and is afraid to deal with them. She learns a hard but necessary lesson from Seto, a boy who looks stunningly like a girl. Specifically, he looks like his sister, who “died because of me;” he claims that her spirit is in a fan, and he wants to go to the extreme of having a sex-change so that he can “die” while his sister can “live again.” Mikuzu can’t go along with this self-destructive gesture.

While they’re talking, a small demon attacks Mikuzu, who knows a few defensive blocks against demons but little else. Seto picks up the demon, saying “Nothing will be solved like this.” Using the fan, clearing away the surface of the demon like peeling off layers of cellophane, Seto reveals that the demon was once a kitten. It then rises up into the air, dissolves, and Becomes One with the Cosmos.

Mikuzu, who saw only the scary surface of the demon, starts to cry. Seto asks her: “Do you finally understand how stupid it is to simply be afraid?” Mikuzu was too afraid to look beyond the surface; this object lesson serves her well as she goes on to deal with, among other things, a possessed piano and a vampire who transforms into a wolf.

 38. The Boy Who Drew Cats

This is one of many Japanese stories translated into English and published by Lafcadio Hearn. Technically, this may be more a monster (youkai) story than a ghost story (kaidan), but it definitely features a haunted temple and battling spirits. And blood; lots of blood. This story would be right at home during a hyaku monogatari.

This story happened in a small rural village many years ago. A farming couple had a great many children, and both the boys and the girls were able to pitch in and help. The youngest son, however, wasn’t much help around the house or in the fields. He was short and not very strong, and his parents soon realized that his destiny would be in studying rather than in farming. So he was sent to the village temple to be an acolyte to the priest.

But, even here, the boy didn’t quite fit in. Even though he was quick-witted and obedient to the priest of the temple, he had one bad habit: he liked drawing cats. He sketched cats in the margins of papers, on the edges of books, and even on the wall screens. He drew cats sleeping, playing, hunting, and they all seemed to be almost alive. Still, this wasn’t why he was sent to live at the temple and study with the priests. The old priest repeatedly asked the boy to stop drawing cats, but it seemed the boy couldn’t stop.

Finally, the old priest took the acolyte aside and said, “Maybe one day you will be a great artist, but I doubt that you will make a good priest. You will have to leave this temple. Before you leave, though, I want to give you some good advice; you haven’t always paid attention to what I have to say, but this is very important. It is this: at night, avoid the large and keep to the small.”

The next day, as he prepared his small bundle of clothes, he thought and thought about what the old priest said. Still, he could make no sense of it. This just helped the boy feel even worse: he felt he was letting his parents down by being sent home from the temple. Then he remembered another temple, in a village about twelve miles away. He decided to go there to see if they would be willing to take him as an acolyte. It was better than returning in failure to the family farm.

By the time the boy got to the temple in the neighboring village, the sun was setting. Strangely, the temple only had one or two candles burning in its many rooms, and there was no sign of priests there. Still, the boy ate the little food that he brought, drew a few of his beloved cat sketches on the walls, and prepared to sleep in the deserted temple. Just as he was about to fall asleep, however, he remembered the words of the old priest: At night, avoid the large and stick to the small. So, leaving the large room where he planned at first to sleep, the boy made himself a nest inside a closet. After drawing another couple of cats inside the closet (because he truly could not help himself), the young boy went to sleep.

However, he was awoken in the middle of the night by the loudest, most frightening noises. There was shrieking and screaming, noises made by nothing human. The boy was glad he remembered the priest’s words to avoid the large, even though he also realized that he was trapped by whatever was rampaging through the temple. All he could do was sit tight and wait until morning—or until the thing found him.

Finally, the boy could see through a crack in the door that the sun had come up. All was quiet, so he cautiously opened the door to the closet. The first thing he saw scared him almost to death, for every inch of the floor of the large room was covered with blood. A quick search of the temple showed where it had come from: the deserted temple had been invaded by a demon shaped like a rat—except that this rat was as big as an ox! What could have killed it?

Then the boy noticed something when he looked at the cats he had drawn the day before. In every picture, the cats’ teeth and claws shone red with blood.

The news spread quickly through the village, and the boy found out the history of the temple. He heard how the rat demon had attacked the temple years ago, killing off or driving out the priests who lived there. He heard that many brave warriors had gone to the temple to try to slay the rat demon; none of the brave warriors were ever heard from again.

But people did hear of the boy, who grew up to become a famous artist.

xxx

The 11-week 2006 anime TV series
Ayakashi
, also known as
Samurai
Horror
Stories
, told two old and famous ghost stories and one original one. Since it had to live up to the impact of
Yotsuya
Kaidan
and the
Tenshu
Monogatari
, the third, original story needed to be something special. It is, in terms of both visuals and scares.

Bake
Neko
(Demon
Cat)
was written by Michiko Yokote (a veteran of television anime from
Cowboy
Bebop
to
Naruto
to
xxxHolic
) and directed by Kenji Nakamura, who worked as a production coordinator on projects as different as the
Sailor
Moon
movies and the
Serial
Experiments
Lain
series. However, the impressive look of these three episodes is the work of designer Takashi Hashimoto, whose career goes back to the nineties with his work on
Giant
Robo
,
Armitage
III
, and
Macross
Plus
. This time, however, the look is like nothing you’ve seen before, which in anime is saying something.

 39. “At first, I only meant to keep her a few days …”

The story, set in the Edo period, starts as the Sakai family, prominent but cash-strapped, is about to marry off their daughter, mainly for the infusion of money from the groom’s family. As she steps over the threshold, however, the bride-to-be drops dead—and she isn’t the only one. A passing merchant, known only as the Medicine Seller, shows that he has other talents as well; to protect the Sakai family from the title demon cat which is preying on them, he scatters
ofuda
on all of the walls. This just buys them some time, however; before he can fight the demon, the Medicine Seller needs to know the family’s darkest secrets, to understand why the demon cat has a grudge against these people. The first explanation—that the head of the family and his son used to test newly purchased samurai swords on cats—just wasn’t convincing. As the pattern has already established, for successful exorcisms the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, must come to light; when it does, the outcome isn’t pretty.

Twenty-five years earlier, the head of the Sakai household stole a young girl on her way to be someone else’s bride. He seduced her in a room in his estate, and, while he claimed at first that she seemed to care for him, things soon took a nasty turn. He ended up imprisoning the girl in his house, raping and abusing her at will. She refused to eat for a time, but her captors didn’t realize that she was giving her scraps of food to a kitten that was in the room with her—her only source of comfort and companionship. She ultimately died of starvation, telling the cat to escape, and find some way to avenge her.

Which it did. The cat came back as a
bakeneko
, a demonic cat. It’s a creature with a long and interesting history. Some of that history appears in the Inō Mononoke scroll, a collection of folklore from the Hiroshima area. The
bakeneko
also appears in
Shrine
of
the
Morning
Mist,
a manga by Hiroki Ugawa largely inspired by the scroll; the manga/anime version of Ugawa’s
bakeneko
character sometimes looks human, sometimes like a cutesy feline/human hybrid (the “catgirl” of many, many manga/anime), and sometimes like a hybrid that’s far more menacing than cutesy. The
bakeneko
could also be confused with the seemingly similar
nekomata
, a kind of
bakeneko
; both are cat demons, but the
nekomata
has learned to walk upright and is noted for having two tails. In Rumiko Takahashi’s
InuYasha
, demon hunter Sango has a pet
nekomata
named Kirara, which turns from a cute little two-tailed kitten into a giant cat as big as a tiger, with fiery paws and the ability to fly. On a more earthy note, the Nekomata are also a low-level Yakuza (organized crime) gang in the manga/anime
Gokusen
.

The Medicine Seller ultimately slays the demon cat afflicting the Sakai family, but by then they could no longer deny their sordid past, and the chambermaid Kayo, who alone seemed to have any kind of good sense, fled the house. The Medicine Seller at the end finds the corpse of an old dead cat, while the spirits of a girl and a kitten, long imprisoned in the Sakai mansion, finally reach the outside world.

Bake
Neko
proved so popular that the Medicine Seller became part of a separate anime series in 2007, called
Mononoke
.
[47]
In this case, the Medicine Seller travels across Japan, getting involved in murder mysteries and in doing so encounters a variety of ghosts and demons. Once again, Michiko Yokote is the writer, Kenji Nakamura is the director, and the unique visuals are by Takashi Hashimoto. The multi-episode stories are
Zashiki
warashi
(see chapter 17),
Umibouzu
,
Nopperabou
(the faceless ghost we encountered in the first pages of this book)
,
Nue
and
Bakeneko
.