A Gathering of Spirits: Japan's Ghost Story Tradition: From Folklore and Kabuki to Anime and Manga (27 page)

 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 defined 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.