Japanese Ghost Stories Read online

  At the same time, Hearn was developing in two other directions, towards the south and east. The southern development would lead him to the West Indies, where he lived from 1887 to 1889. Two Years in the French West Indies (1890), an idiosyncratic mixture of travelogue, analysis and a ghost story, shows Hearn honing a leaner, more powerful prose style, which would form the template for his later Japanese books.

  His eventual, definitive turn eastward to Japan was foreshadowed in a number of developments while he was in New Orleans. Hearn was impressed by the Japanese section of the New Orleans Cotton Centennial Exposition of 1884–5, about which he wrote in Harper’s Weekly (31 May 1885) under the title ‘The East at New Orleans’, and he began to muse on the relationship of Japanese to ancient Greek art; parallels between Japan and classical Greece would later be central to his analysis of Japan. His mind had already turned towards the East as he prepared the material for his 1884 book Stray Leaves from Strange Literature, which was partly derived from Buddhist sources, among others, while Some Chinese Ghosts would follow three years later. Hearn experimented with more personal expression in the ‘Fantastics’ of his New Orleans years, short flights of fancy that explored the themes of love and death in the southern city and which he published in the Times-Democrat. He published two short novels, Chita: A Memory of Last Island (1889) and Youma: The Story of a West-Indian Slave (1890), but abandoned fiction from this point. After a great deal of literary experimentation in New Orleans, he would henceforth have a single focus, Japan.

  Japan

  In 1890, approaching forty, Hearn landed in Japan, where he would spend the rest of his life. Shortly after his arrival, he broke with the New York publisher Harper & Brothers, which had been publishing his work in the latter part of the 1880s, his West Indian material especially; simmering tensions over the amount of his material being published and the manner in which it was being edited, as well as the amounts he was being paid, which had existed since his sojourn in the West Indies, now caused a breakdown in relations with Harper. Whatever hopes he might have had of living by his pen were now dashed; he settled down as a teacher and, from 1896, a lecturer at Tokyo University. In Japan he matured both as a person and as a writer, developing a masterly command of simple English. He maintained an impressive literary output of approximately a book a year, mostly published in and for the American market.

  Hearn spent his first year in Japan as a secondary-school teacher in Matsue, a small city on the country’s west coast, far from cosmopolitan Tokyo to the east. Here he found traditional Japan and loved it. He was introduced to a Japanese woman of the samurai class, Setsuko (Setsu) Koizumi, whom he subsequently married. She provided him with a companionship that had eluded him up to this point in his adult life and they would have four children together. The cold of winter in Matsue was, however, too much for Hearn and he moved south to Kumamoto on the southern island of Kyushu, where he was again employed as a school teacher. This proved to be Hearn’s unhappiest experience in Japan – he liked neither the place nor the people – and he left again in 1894 to take up a short-lived editorial job with the Kobe Chronicle before eye problems forced him to resign his post and he was unable to work for a year and a half.

  In 1896, Hearn was appointed to the prestigious and lucrative post of lecturer at Tokyo Imperial University. The move to Tokyo can be seen as a watershed in both his life and writing. His Japanese books from this point on, with the exception of Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation (1904), are unusual and idiosyncratic mixtures of various elements, including descriptive passages, analyses of rapidly changing Meiji Japan and kwaidan, or ghost stories. Flashbacks to a horror-haunted childhood in Ireland are mostly contained in his later books, Exotics and Retrospectives (1898) and Shadowings (1900) especially.

  Hearn professed to hate the bustling, modernizing capital city at the forefront of transformation of the Meiji era (1868–1912), even though he understood the brutal necessity of change; without it, Japan would be at the mercy of predatory Western imperial powers. Hearn was sometimes ambiguous about Japan in private correspondence, professing to a sense of disillusionment and even occasionally considering leaving the country, but his commitment to Japanese culture never wavered. He would hold the post at Tokyo University for eight years, during which time he adopted Japanese nationality under the name Koizumi Yakumo (Koizumi being his wife’s surname) to safeguard his family’s right of inheritance. This had the effect, however, of a parting of the ways with Tokyo University in 1904 when it decided to apply to him the lower salary paid to Japanese nationals. He was replaced at Tokyo University by the distinguished Japanese novelist Natsume Sōseki, whose 1914 novel Kokoro would bear the same title as Hearn’s 1896 volume. Hearn immediately found alternative employment and had just taken up his new post as lecturer at Waseda University when he died of heart disease on 26 September 1904.

  Japanese Ghost Stories

  It was in Japan that Hearn’s literary output became increasingly dominated by ghost stories. Although written in English and largely for a Western audience, Hearn’s stories stand apart from those of his contemporaries in Britain and Ireland. Victorian ghost and horror stories were mostly products of the imaginations of writers such as Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker and M. R. James. They may have had roots in folklore but were essentially literary in nature. Hearn is unique in creating a coherent body of ghost stories based entirely on folk originals translated into English from another language and culture.

  Folklore in all its forms had always captivated Hearn, from the goblins and fairies of his Irish childhood through to the ballads of east London, the Creole and Cajun cultures of New Orleans, and the tales of zombies in the West Indies. When he reached Japan, he was again enthralled by native folk traditions, this time in the form of ghost stories. He was fortunate that his wife, Setsu, eagerly sought out old books of ghost stories, which she translated and interpreted for him. (Whether others, such as his students, were also involved, is a moot point.) In her ‘Reminiscences’, Setsu laid bare the combination of Hearn’s technical mastery and emotional engagement with the raw material which lay at the heart of his kwaidan output:

  He loved ghost stories very much and was always saying, ‘Books of ghost stories are my treasures.’ I hunted for them from one secondhand bookstore to another. On dreary nights, I would tell him ghost stories, having lowered the wick of the lamp on purpose. He listened to my tales with bated breath and with a terrified air, and when he asked me something, he did so in a very low voice. Since he looked as if he were really frightened while listening to me, my narrative increasingly took on a life of its own. On those occasions, my house seemed as if it were haunted, and I sometimes had horrible dreams and came to be afflicted with nightmares. When I mentioned this to him, he would say, ‘Well, then, let’s take a break for a while.’ And we would stop. But when a story that I told him caught his fancy, he was extremely pleased.

  If it was an old tale, I always summarized the story first. Then, if he found it interesting, he would write down the plot. Next, he would ask me to tell the story in all its details; he made me repeat the same story several times in succession. If I was going to tell a story by reading it from a book, he would say, ‘Don’t read from a book when you tell a story. You must tell a story as if it were your own story – in your own words and from your own thoughts.’ Consequently, I had to digest and assimilate the story before telling it. That was the reason for my dreams.

  Once he took an interest in a story, he always changed and became very serious: he turned pale and a sharp fearful look came into his eyes. The extent of this change was extraordinary. This was the case, for example, with the story of O-Katsu-san in ‘The Legend of Yūrei-Daki’ which appears in the first part of the book Kottō. As I was telling the story, his face became very pale and his eyes fixed. That was not uncommon, but on this particular occasion I myself suddenly became frightened. When I finished telling the story, he took a long breath as if relieved and said, ‘It�
�s a very engaging tale.’ Then he asked me to say, ‘Oh! It is blood!’ again and to repeat it over and over. He then asked me, ‘How do you think she said it? What was the tone of her voice like? What sound do you imagine her clogs made? What kind of night was it?’ He consulted with me about many things that were not written in the original, saying, ‘I think it was like this. What do you yourself think?’ If anyone had seen us from the outside, we would have appeared like two mad people.13

  That Hearn drew heavily on old books of Japanese ghost stories is confirmed by the information he himself provides. He acknowledged his debt to The Classical Poetry of the Japanese (1880), by the English Japanologist Basil Hall Chamberlain, for the story of Urashima Tarō, contained in ‘The Dream of a Summer Day’.14 He also footnoted sources for his ghost stories in his published work, many of them older anthologies such as Aoki Rosui’s Otogi Hyaku Monogatari (‘One Hundred Tales for Keeping Company’) of 1701 or Ueda Akinari’s Ugetsu Monogatari (‘Tales of Moonlight and Rain’) of 1776. Some were based on legends or on conversations with rural inhabitants.

  His painstaking note-taking is confirmed by Setsu: ‘All the things Hearn saw and heard at this time were new to him, so he took a lively pleasure in them, always writing copious notes, which gave him a lot of pleasure.’15

  Spirits and Spirituality

  Why did ghosts become so important to Hearn in Japan? It was partly because his life story, though seemingly linear – a long odyssey that culminated in his maturity as a writer in Japan – also contained circular elements. In Japan, the terrors of his childhood dreams resurfaced and he reverted to an interest in Buddhism which had developed while he was in New Orleans. A bridging element was his earlier loss of faith in Christianity and, by extension, monotheism while he was in England.

  Hearn expressed a coherent philosophy of the supernatural in his early years in Japan, one that aligned with the rejection of Western materialism – which he believed had squeezed the spiritual out of people’s lives – evident in his interpretative work. In the story ‘The Eternal Haunter’ (1898), for example, Hearn characterizes a relationship between a tree-spirit and a mortal man as ‘the Impossible’ and defiantly sets out a non-materialist philosophy at odds with the mainstream values of the nineteenth century:

  I hold that the Impossible bears a much closer relation to fact than does most of what we call the real and the commonplace. The Impossible may not be naked truth; but I think that it is usually truth, – masked and veiled, perhaps, but eternal. (p. 33)

  In 1893 he discussed the passing of ‘the aspirational’ from everyday life in a letter to Chamberlain:

  What made the aspirational in life? Ghosts. Some were called Gods, some Demons, some Angels; – they changed the world for man; they gave him courage and purpose and the awe of Nature that slowly changed into love; – they filled all things with a sense and motion of invisible life, – they made both terror and beauty. There are no ghosts, no angels and demons and gods: all are dead. The world of electricity, steam, mathematics, is blank and cold and void. No man can even write about it. Who can find a speck of romance in it?16

  Much of Hearn’s writing for the rest of his life would be concerned with presenting the supernatural elements inherent in the Japanese folk tradition to his largely American audience. He could hardly have anticipated the appetite his Western and, later, Japanese readers, mostly now living in a modern world of electricity, steam and mathematics, would have for this work.

  The Victorian era, especially for Anglicanism, was a period of immense religious turmoil as the hammer blows of science put traditional beliefs under strain, in response to which artists and intellectuals began to explore alternative spiritual avenues. Many looked to the East, and to Buddhism in particular, for enlightenment. Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831–91), for example, a Russian occultist who counted the poet W. B. Yeats among her many adherents, developed the Theosophy movement, an esoteric synthesis of science, religion and philosophy. Supposedly reviving an ‘Ancient Wisdom’ underlying all the world’s religions, Theosophy took Buddhism as one of its key elements. Hearn himself would attempt a synthesis of Buddhism with the then fashionable evolutionary philosophy of Herbert Spencer.

  Hearn was deeply drawn to the Buddhism of Japan. As Kenneth Roxroth, editor of The Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, writes, ‘There is no interpreter of Japanese Buddhism quite like Hearn … It is the Buddhism of the ordinary Japanese Buddhist of whatever sect.’17 Early in his stay in Japan, Hearn had also become fascinated by Shintō, the ancient animistic religion with its belief in ubiquitous kami or spirits and the essential continuity between the kami and the human world. In its ancient form, it envisaged three different worlds or states of being, which included the yomi-no-kuni, a land of the dead or world of darkness, similar to the realm of Hades in classical Greek mythology. Hearn believed that Buddhism’s status as the official state religion was due to its ‘absorption and expansion of the older Shintō worship of many gods, ghosts, and goblins (the gods, Buddhas or Bodhisattvas, the ghosts beings [sic] in transit from one incarnation to another, and the goblins, gakis, beings suffering in a lower state of existence)’.18

  Within Buddhist doctrine, souls were thought to live in zones of formlessness until the time of rebirth. They were fed by surviving relatives and, if nobody cared for them, they could haunt living people. If sickness or calamity afflicted a community, it was attributed to inadequate propitiation of ghosts. The yūrei of Japanese kwaidan folklore, corresponding to the Western idea of ghosts, are the spirits of those whose manner of death precludes them from a peaceful union with their ancestors, and they can return to the human world.

  In the late seventeenth century, the yūrei began to feature in literature, theatre and art. Maruyama Ōkyo’s (1733–95) painting The Ghost of Oyuki (1750) reflected the popularity of this ghostly subject matter. Just how powerful the Japanese belief in ghosts remained prior to the modernization of the Meiji era is best illustrated, literally, by the work of the great artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), creator of the iconic Great Wave off Kanagawa print in his famous series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (c.1830–32). In the words of the American author and art expert James A. Michener (1907–97), Hokusai ‘lived in a demon-riddled world … where gods and spirits and men overlapped, where ghosts walked and where a man could quickly allow himself to slip away into fantasy’.19 Describing Hokusai’s ghost-story prints, Michener says:

  These drawings deal with the terrifying ghosts that haunt Japan, and in studying Hokusai’s depiction of these fiends, the Western observer becomes convinced that for the artist these ghosts were real. Faithful wives whose husbands abused them were known to have the capacity of returning after death to haunt their spouses. Blood cried out from the grave, and victims of injustice gained revenge.20

  This is also the world of Hearn’s Japanese ghost stories. While some Shintō influences can be seen in them, Buddhism is their common denominator. In ‘Story of a Tengu’ (1899), for example, a pious priest is transported back in time to hear the voice of the Buddha preaching the law as a reward for a good deed. ‘The Sympathy of Benten’ (1900) features a Buddhist deity acting as a matchmaker for two of her worshippers, while the pilgrim in ‘Fragment’ (1899) climbs a mountain of skulls that are the product of his billions of former lives. Reincarnation features prominently and can result in serious complications for the social order, as in ‘Riki-Baka’ (1904), where a dead simpleton is reborn into a rich family, or ‘The Story of Itō Norisuké’ (also 1904), where fateful meetings have taken place in previous lives. Other stories illustrate the positive power of Buddhist prayer and divine intervention.

  Hearn’s use of reincarnation as both a motif and plot device gives his stories a particularly Japanese flavour but themes familiar from Western horror also abound, including vampirism, revenge by the dead (especially on the part of women who feel betrayed), shape-shifting, the consequences of impiety or immorality, and intermarriage between ghostly women an
d mortal men.

  Vampirism, which featured in nineteenth-century European literature from John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) through Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), also recurs throughout Hearn’s kwaidan. The title character in ‘The Story of Chūgorō’ has been drained of his blood by a female vampire; ‘Jikininki’ (1904) tells the story of a debased priest who becomes a devourer of human flesh; and in ‘The Story of O-Kamé’ (1902), a dead wife leeches the life out of her husband.

  Bram Stoker was Hearn’s contemporary growing up in middle-class Dublin in the 1850s and 1860s and, although we don’t know whether their families knew each other, the parallels between Hearn’s kwaidan stories (1890–1904) and Stoker’s Dracula (1897) are striking. In ‘A Passional Karma’ (1899), ghosts can enter the house ‘like a streaming of vapor’ (p. 56), just as Count Dracula does, while the sacred Buddhist mamori performs much the same function in combating evil as Roman Catholic religious objects do in Dracula. Just as Count Dracula is able to freeze Jonathan Harker while he vampirizes his wife, so, in ‘Of a Promise Broken’ (1901), a supernatural power is able to render its unfortunate victim frozen and motionless. In ‘Rokuro-Kubi’ (1904), the power of the goblins is effective only in the hours of darkness, paralleling the limitations of Count Dracula. And like Count Dracula, Hearn’s ghosts enjoy immunity to mortal weapons. Although Stoker’s inspiration was European and Hearn’s largely Japanese, the similarities in their writing indicate the common folkloric and fairy-tale elements that underlay much of the output of their generation of fin-de-siècle Gothic writers.