A Gathering of Spirits: Japan's Ghost Story Tradition: From Folklore and Kabuki to Anime and Manga (19 page)

Haunted
Junction

One of the ghost stories told at the very beginning of the
Ghost
Hunt
manga recalls Red Mantle, but doesn’t quite tell the whole story:

Someone standing outside a public toilet at night (although other locations and times of day come up in other versions of the legend) is asked a question by what seems at first to be a disembodied voice: “The red cloak or the blue cloak?” The only acceptable answer is to run away at top speed, because at least that way you’d stay alive. If you asked for a red cloak, your throat would be slashed from ear to ear, and you’d be left to die in a pool of your own blood (the red cloak). The blue cloak isn’t a much better end: death by strangulation, leaving a body with a blue-tinted face.

This time around, however, Red Mantle is a drop-dead
bishounen
, not unlike Tuxedo Mask in
Sailor
Moon
. He doesn’t kill anyone, nor do the other ghosts in
Haunted
Junction,
a “late-night” anime of 12 episodes broadcast in Japan in 1997.

The seven principal ghosts haunting Saito High School are a motley crew, but mostly inspired by school ghost legends. Along with Red Mantle (his sister, Blue Mantle, appears in one episode), there is the Mirror Girl, a child who appears in (and travels through) mirrors, evoking the story “In a Cup of Tea” from Hearn’s
Kwaidan
.

On the more modern side, there’s the statue of Sontoku Ninomiya
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which used to stand on the grounds of every Japanese school. Ninomiya (1787-1856) was a prominent agrarian reformer, but was also remembered (and still is today) for setting an example for Japanese youth: the school statues showed a young Ninomiya reading a book while carrying a bundle of firewood on his back. School
kaidan
maintain that the Ninomiya statue can be found running around the school grounds at night; in this case, one member of Saito High’s Holy Student Council, a Shinto
miko
, tries to make the ghostly statue her love-slave.

Parallel to this is Kazumi Ryudo, a young Buddhist monk, and his interest in the ghost of Toilet Hanako. Toilet ghosts have a long history in Japan, predating the building of modern schools. The ghost is responsible for toilet stall doors opening and closing by themselves. Calling Hanako’s name causes her to appear, as she does in
Gakkou
no
Kaidan
asking, “Shall we play?”—the rest is often too frightening to tell.
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While ghosts in elementary school are all about scaring people, this Toilet Hanako is in Saito High School’s boys’ bathroom and, with her very revealing schoolgirl uniform, appeals to the sexual side of the male students. She especially appeals to Ryudo, a young Buddhist monk like his father. This teen monk has a thing for Hanako-san, and tries to hook up with her (and any and every other young attractive female toilet ghost in Japan) every chance he gets.
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Things get in the way, though, including the spirits of various dogs and cats near Saito High; Ryudo is so sensitive to ghosts that he often gets possessed by random passing spirits—even the non-human ones.

Two of the ghosts live in the school science lab. Bones is, as his name suggests, an animated skeleton. Its partner Haruo is also an animated teaching tool; specifically, the “living boy” cutaway statue with removable wooden “organs”. Those statues can be creepy enough during daylight hours; it makes sense that the image of this statue, like the Ninomiya statue, moving around a school after dark on its own, would become part of modern ghost lore. These two ghosts, however, are rather lame; their big “scare” in the anime consists of breaking into a Russian folk-dance.

The school gymnasium is haunted by a nameless giant, who’s so big that all anyone ever sees of him is his foot.

The Chairman rounds off the list of school spirits; yes, a ghost runs the haunted school, which accounts for most of the ghostly goings-on. He collects occult objects, which brings unwanted spirit phenomena into the school time and again.

While the ghosts often drive the action, with the resident ghosts having either to assist or protect the school and/or each other from outsider ghosts, the story centers on three human high school students. These make up the Holy Student Council, and they’re all exorcists out of different traditions, as in
Ghost
Hunt
. We’ve already met Buddhist monk Kazumi Ryudo and Shinto
miko
Asahina Mutsuki; the third member, and often the focus of the series, is Haruto Hojuko. He’s a Christian, who sometimes appears in a white variation of Catholic clerical garb—as do both his father and mother. (Perhaps this is part of the joke, that a woman would wear priest’s robes, given the Catholic Church’s antipathy toward women in the priesthood, as compared to the tradition of Shinto priestesses and Buddhist nuns in Japan.) Unlike John Brown in
Ghost
Hunt
, Haruto’s exorcist technique isn’t orthodox, and is handled almost like a superpower.

Still, throughout the 12 episodes, Haruto bemoans his school, his place on the Holy Student Council, and every eccentric thing in his life. He repeatedly complains that his life isn’t
normal
. All he wants is to finish school, get a job, get a girlfriend—all of the mundane things that seem to happen at every other school to every other teenager but never to him. It isn’t until the final episode that he gets to see how lucky he is that his life isn’t normal (which in this case is defined as dull, gray, and faceless).

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Jigoku
Sensei
Nube

The title
Jigoku
Sensei
Nube
(literally,
Nube,
the
Teacher
from
Hell
) certainly has more of a flourish than “Meisuke Nueno, Fifth-Grade Teacher at Domori Elementary School.” This particular anime, consisting of 48 episodes broadcast from 1996 to 1997, plus three movies and three OAV episodes, was based on a manga with artwork by Takeshi Okano and story by Sho Makura that ran in
Shonen
Jump
from 1993 to 1999. Unfortunately, this classic comedy/supernatural series never traveled outside of Japan.

Meisuke wears a glove on one hand, to cover his
oni
no
te
(demon hand). As an exorcist, Meisuke had gotten into a battle with a demon, and the only way to defeat it was to take the demon into himself. The hand serves as a weapon against paranormal threats (although Meisuke often botches some of the lesser spells he tries in the school—such as the opening pages of the manga, in which he tries to exorcise a demon from a picture of Beethoven. I suspect that he sometimes loses these contests in part to inspire his fifth graders to keep trying).

He’s also married to a
yukionna
, named Yukime, who he rescued from a snowy mountain encounter with a hunter. She left the mountain, moved to the village of Domori, and found a job as an ice skating coach. This is a good example of the tenor of
Jigoku
Sensei
Nube
: some of the ghosts and demons are truly menacing and threatening, and others are cute or silly. Maybe it’s this dual attitude that kept the series from successfully traveling to the west. American ghost stories tend to be either menacing or silly; not both at once.

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Shoujo
Kakumei
Utena
: The Black Rose story-arc

The television series
Shojo
Kakumei
Utena
(
Revolutionary
Girl
Utena
), whose creators are collectively known as Be Papas, can be divided into three story-arcs. In the first 13 of the 39 episodes, the viewer learns the basics of Ootori Academy, its odd custom of dueling to “revolutionize the world,” and the various characters who make up the cast. For this chapter, we look at episodes 14 through 23, which form its own sub-plot, which happens to be a kind-of ghost story.

 62. One Hundred for One

The major incident is shown at the beginning of the arc: a fire which claimed the lives of one hundred students. We never see them as spirits; we do, however, see their silhouettes, like crime scene chalk outlines, in the dueling arena, along with one hundred empty desks. As to why they died…

A student named Shouji Mikage introduces Utena (and us) to Nemuro Memorial Hall, where the fire occurred years ago. Mikage has an agenda: searching for “the power of Dios,” which he believes to be the key to immortality. At the moment, the power rests in Anthy Himemiya, the Rose Bride, who is “engaged” to Utena. Mikage is convinced that, to get to the power of Dios, Anthy must be destroyed, which means that Anthy’s protector Utena must be defeated in a duel. Toward that end, Mikage plays on the fears and doubts of various students, offering to resolve their fears by having them duel Utena. They all lose, of course, and ultimately Mikage has to take up the sword himself and go after Utena.

Before he can do so, we see in flashback what the fire was about. A research professor, named Nemuro, was hired from outside the Academy. He headed up a research team of one hundred students who seem to be searching for the key to immortality. Nemuro didn’t really care; cold and detached, he described himself as a robot. This changed, however, when he became fixated on Tokiko Chida, sent by the Board of Governors to inspect the research, and on her sickly younger brother Mamiya. Tempted into believing that time can be stopped, Nemuro’s optimism is jolted when he witnesses Tokiko being seduced by Akio, Anthy’s brother.
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The next thing we see is the building going up in flames; during the flashback we are led to believe that Mamiya set the fire at Nemuro’s request. Later, we realize that Nemuro set it himself out of his sense of betrayal.

Although this isn’t a traditional Japanese ghost story, there are similarities, notably in the quintessentially Japanese theme that eternal life is a curse, and that ghosts remain miserable after life because they cannot change or grow without assistance.
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At one point, Mamiya, noting that his sister Tokiko dries flowers to preserve them, wonders “if the flowers themselves are happy, being forced to live so long.” Akio also warns the viewer that, as long as anyone stays at Ootori Academy, “a person will never become an adult.”

This is taken to another level, becoming more than a metaphor, when we realize that the student Souji Mikage, who has been trying to remove Anthy as the Rose Bride, was actually Professor Nemuro. Having achieved immortality in the shape of a high school student, he can only hang onto it by living a life of illusions, one of which is that Mamiya started the fire and not he, and sending others to fight the duels he only fought as a last resort. Once he is defeated, both he and Nemuro Memorial Hall itself are history.

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Negima:
Sayo Aizaka

The tragic nature of a ghost—static and unchanging, bound by the circumstances of its past—even comes into play, although in a surprisingly pleasant form, in
Negima!
, a popular anime based on an equally popular manga by Ken Akamatsu. Mingling aspects of Akamatsu’s successful “harem romance” manga
Love
Hina
with bits of the Harry Potter story,
Negima!
tells of a ten year old British wizard, Negi Springfield, who must complete his training by going to Mahora Academy, an all-girl school in Japan, to teach junior-high English. In addition to the overabundance of “fan service,”
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most of Negi’s students are also magical, and range from a robot to a ninja, a sorceress disguised as a vampire, and a ghost: Sayo Aizaka.

 63. A Ghost in the Garden

There’s never been an adequate explanation at Mahora Academy of why Sayo Aizaka should be on the rolls for second year of middle school, but never shows up for class. Some say she was a transfer student who never left her old school. Others call her “Typo Girl” believing that a printing error keeps her name on the roster year after year.

The first hint of Sayo’s true condition is when we first “see” her in the manga: in the roster of Negi’s homeroom students, complete with photos. While all the other girls were photographed wearing the modern girls’ school uniform of white shirt, tie, and blazer, Sayo is the only one wearing an old-fashioned middie blouse. Under her picture is the cryptic statement: “1940—Don’t change her seating.” Things are different in the anime: from the first episode we see Sayo in crowd scenes, but she speaks to nobody and nobody speaks to her. It’s all a tease (and a tip of the hat to M. Night Shyamalan) that doesn’t get explained until much later.