Japanese Ghost Stories Read online

  ‘Before the youth had become a man, his parents died. But he was able to enter the service of a rich samurai, an officer of high rank, who had been a friend of his people. And his protector soon took him into great favor, seeing him to be courteous, intelligent, and apt at arms. So the young man hoped to find himself shortly in a position that would make it possible for him to marry his betrothed. But war broke out in the north and east; and he was summoned suddenly to follow his master to the field. Before departing, however, he was able to see the girl; and they exchanged pledges in the presence of her parents; and he promised, should he remain alive, to return within a year from that day to marry his betrothed.

  ‘After his going much time passed without news of him, for there was no post in that time as now; and the girl grieved so much for thinking of the chances of war that she became all white and thin and weak. Then at last she heard of him through a messenger sent from the army to bear news to the daimyō, and once again a letter was brought to her by another messenger. And thereafter there came no word. Long is a year to one who waits. And the year passed, and he did not return.

  ‘Other seasons passed, and still he did not come; and she thought him dead; and she sickened and lay down, and died, and was buried. Then her old parents, who had no other child, grieved unspeakably, and came to hate their home for the lonesomeness of it. After a time they resolved to sell all they had, and to set out upon a sengaji – the great pilgrimage to the Thousand Temples of the Nichiren-Shū, which requires many years to perform. So they sold their small house with all that it contained, excepting the ancestral tablets, and the holy things which must never be sold, and the ihai5 of their buried daughter, which were placed, according to the custom of those about to leave their native place, in the family temple. Now the family was of the Nichiren-Shū; and their temple was Myōkōji.

  ‘They had been gone only four days when the young man who had been betrothed to their daughter returned to the city. He had attempted, with the permission of his master, to fulfil his promise. But the provinces upon his way were full of war, and the roads and passes were guarded by troops, and he had been long delayed by many difficulties. And when he heard of his misfortune he sickened for grief, and many days remained without knowledge of anything, like one about to die.

  ‘But when he began to recover his strength, all the pain of memory came back again; and he regretted that he had not died. Then he resolved to kill himself upon the grave of his betrothed; and, as soon as he was able to go out unobserved, he took his sword and went to the cemetery where the girl was buried: it is a lonesome place – the cemetery of Myōkōji. There he found her tomb, and knelt before it, and prayed and wept, and whispered to her that which he was about to do. And suddenly he heard her voice cry to him: “Anata!”6 and felt her hand upon his hand; and he turned, and saw her kneeling beside him, smiling, and beautiful as he remembered her, only a little pale. Then his heart leaped so that he could not speak for the wonder and the doubt and the joy of that moment. But she said: “Do not doubt: it is really I. I am not dead. It was all a mistake. I was buried, because my people thought me dead – buried too soon. And my own parents thought me dead, and went upon a pilgrimage. Yet you see, I am not dead – not a ghost. It is I: do not doubt it! And I have seen your heart, and that was worth all the waiting, and the pain … But now let us go away at once to another city, so that people may not know this thing and trouble us; for all still believe me dead.”

  ‘And they went away, no one observing them. And they went even to the village of Minobu, which is in the province of Kai. For there is a famous temple of the Nichiren-Shū in that place; and the girl had said: “I know that in the course of their pilgrimage my parents will surely visit Minobu: so that if we dwell there, they will find us, and we shall be all again together.” And when they came to Minobu, she said: “Let us open a little shop.” And they opened a little food-shop, on the wide way leading to the holy place; and there they sold cakes for children, and toys, and food for pilgrims. For two years they so lived and prospered; and there was a son born to them.

  ‘Now when the child was a year and two months old, the parents of the wife came in the course of their pilgrimage to Minobu; and they stopped at the little shop to buy food. And seeing their daughter’s betrothed, they cried out and wept and asked questions. Then he made them enter, and bowed down before them, and astonished them, saying: “Truly as I speak it, your daughter is not dead; and she is my wife; and we have a son. And she is even now within the farther room, lying down with the child. I pray you go in at once and gladden her, for her heart longs for the moment of seeing you again.”

  ‘So while he busied himself in making all things ready for their comfort, they entered the inner room very softly – the mother first.

  ‘They found the child asleep; but the mother they did not find. She seemed to have gone out for a little while only: her pillow was still warm. They waited long for her: then they began to seek her. But never was she seen again.

  ‘And they understood only when they found beneath the coverings which had covered the mother and child, something which they remembered having left years before in the temple of Myōkōji – a little mortuary tablet – the ihai of their buried daughter.’

  I suppose I must have looked thoughtful after this tale; for the old man said:

  ‘Perhaps the Master honorably thinks concerning the story that it is foolish?’

  ‘Nay, Kinjurō, the story is in my heart.’

  The Dream of a Summer Day

  I

  The hotel seemed to me a paradise, and the maids thereof celestial beings. This was because I had just fled away from one of the Open Ports, where I had ventured to seek comfort in a European hotel, supplied with all ‘modern improvements’. To find myself at ease once more in a yukata,1 seated upon cool, soft matting, waited upon by sweet-voiced girls, and surrounded by things of beauty, was therefore like a redemption from all the sorrows of the nineteenth century. Bamboo-shoots and lotus-bulbs were given me for breakfast, and a fan from heaven for a keepsake. The design upon that fan represented only the white rushing burst of one great wave on a beach, and sea-birds shooting in exultation through the blue overhead. But to behold it was worth all the trouble of the journey. It was a glory of light, a thunder of motion, a triumph of sea-wind – all in one. It made me want to shout when I looked at it.

  Between the cedarn balcony pillars I could see the course of the pretty gray town following the shore-sweep – and yellow lazy junks asleep at anchor – and the opening of the bay between enormous green cliffs – and beyond it the blaze of summer to the horizon. In that horizon there were mountain shapes faint as old memories. And all things but the gray town, and the yellow junks, and the green cliffs, were blue.

  Then a voice softly toned as a wind-bell began to tinkle words of courtesy into my reverie, and broke it; and I perceived that the mistress of the palace had come to thank me for the chadai,fn1 and I prostrated myself before her. She was very young, and more than pleasant to look upon – like the moth maidens, like the butterfly-women, of Kunisada. And I thought at once of death; for the beautiful is sometimes a sorrow of anticipation.

  She asked whither I honorably intended to go, that she might order a kuruma2 for me.

  And I made answer:

  ‘To Kumamoto. But the name of your house I much wish to know, that I may always remember it.’

  ‘My guest-rooms,’ she said, ‘are augustly insignificant, and my maidens honorably rude. But the house is called the House of Urashima. And now I go to order a kuruma.’

  The music of her voice passed; and I felt enchantment falling all about me – like the thrilling of a ghostly web. For the name was the name of the story of a song that bewitches men.

  II

  Once you hear the story, you will never be able to forget it. Every summer when I find myself on the coast – especially of very soft, still days – it haunts me most persistently. There are many native versions of it wh
ich have been the inspiration for countless works of art. But the most impressive and the most ancient is found in the ‘Manyefushifu’,3 a collection of poems dating from the fifth to the ninth century. From this ancient version the great scholar Aston4 translated it into prose, and the great scholar Chamberlain5 into both prose and verse. But for English readers I think the most charming form of it is Chamberlain’s version written for children, in the ‘Japanese Fairy-Tale Series’ – because of the delicious colored pictures by native artists. With that little book before me, I shall try to tell the legend over again in my own words.

  Fourteen hundred and sixteen years ago, the fisher-boy Urashima Tarō left the shore of Suminoyé in his boat.

  Summer days were then as now – all drowsy and tender blue, with only some light, pure white clouds hanging over the mirror of the sea. Then, too, were the hills the same – far blue soft shapes melting into the blue sky. And the winds were lazy.

  And presently the boy, also lazy, let his boat drift as he fished. It was a queer boat, unpainted and rudderless, of a shape you probably never saw. But still, after fourteen hundred years, there are such boats to be seen in front of the ancient fishing-hamlets of the coast of the Sea of Japan.

  After long waiting, Urashima caught something, and drew it up to him. But he found it was only a tortoise.

  Now a tortoise is sacred to the Dragon God of the Sea, and the period of its natural life is a thousand – some say ten thousand – years. So that to kill it is very wrong. The boy gently unfastened the creature from his line, and set it free, with a prayer to the gods.

  But he caught nothing more. And the day was very warm; and sea and air and all things were very, very silent. And a great drowsiness grew upon him – and he slept in his drifting boat.

  Then out of the dreaming of the sea rose up a beautiful girl – just as you can see her in the picture to Professor Chamberlain’s ‘Urashima’ – robed in crimson and blue, with long black hair flowing down her back even to her feet, after the fashion of a prince’s daughter fourteen hundred years ago.

  Gliding over the waters she came, softly as air; and she stood above the sleeping boy in the boat, and woke him with a light touch, and said:

  ‘Do not be surprised. My father, the Dragon King of the Sea, sent me to you, because of your kind heart. For to-day you set free a tortoise. And now we will go to my father’s palace in the island where summer never dies; and I will be your flower-wife if you wish; and we shall live there happily forever.’

  And Urashima wondered more and more as he looked upon her; for she was more beautiful than any human being, and he could not but love her. Then she took one oar, and he took another, and they rowed away together – just as you may still see, off the far western coast, wife and husband rowing together, when the fishing-boats flit into the evening gold.

  They rowed away softly and swiftly over the silent blue water down into the south – till they came to the island where summer never dies – and to the palace of the Dragon King of the Sea.

  [Here the text of the little book suddenly shrinks away as you read, and faint blue ripplings flood the page; and beyond them in a fairy horizon you can see the long low soft shore of the island, and peaked roofs rising through evergreen foliage – the roofs of the Sea God’s palace – like the palace of the Mikado Yuriaku,6 fourteen hundred and sixteen years ago.]

  There strange servitors came to receive them in robes of ceremony – creatures of the Sea, who paid greeting to Urashima as the son-in-law of the Dragon King.

  So the Sea God’s daughter became the bride of Urashima; and it was a bridal of wondrous splendor; and in the Dragon Palace there was great rejoicing.

  And each day for Urashima there were new wonders and new pleasures: wonders of the deepest deep brought up by the servants of the Ocean God; pleasures of that enchanted land where summer never dies. And so three years passed.

  But in spite of all these things, the fisher-boy felt always a heaviness at his heart when he thought of his parents waiting alone. So that at last he prayed his bride to let him go home for a little while only, just to say one word to his father and mother – after which he would hasten back to her.

  At these words she began to weep; and for a long time she continued to weep silently. Then she said to him: ‘Since you wish to go, of course you must go. I fear your going very much; I fear we shall never see each other again. But I will give you a little box to take with you. It will help you to come back to me if you will do what I tell you. Do not open it. Above all things, do not open it – no matter what may happen! Because, if you open it, you will never be able to come back, and you will never see me again.’

  Then she gave him a little lacquered box tied about with a silken cord. [And that box can be seen unto this day in the temple of Kanagawa, by the seashore; and the priests there also keep Urashima Tarō’s fishing line, and some strange jewels which he brought back with him from the realm of the Dragon King.]

  But Urashima comforted his bride, and promised her never, never to open the box – never even to loosen the silken string. Then he passed away through the summer light over the ever-sleeping sea; and the shape of the island where summer never dies faded behind him like a dream; and he saw again before him the blue mountains of Japan, sharpening in the white glow of the northern horizon.

  Again at last he glided into his native bay; again he stood upon its beach. But as he looked, there came upon him a great bewilderment – a weird doubt.

  For the place was at once the same, and yet not the same. The cottage of his fathers had disappeared. There was a village; but the shapes of the houses were all strange, and the trees were strange, and the fields, and even the faces of the people. Nearly all remembered landmarks were gone; the Shintō temple appeared to have been rebuilt in a new place; the woods had vanished from the neighboring slopes. Only the voice of the little stream flowing through the settlement, and the forms of the mountains, were still the same. All else was unfamiliar and new. In vain he tried to find the dwelling of his parents; and the fisherfolk stared wonderingly at him; and he could not remember having ever seen any of those faces before.

  There came along a very old man, leaning on a stick, and Urashima asked him the way to the house of the Urashima family. But the old man looked quite astonished, and made him repeat the question many times, and then cried out:

  ‘Urashima Tarō! Where do you come from that you do not know the story? Urashima Tarō! Why, it is more than four hundred years since he was drowned, and a monument is erected to his memory in the graveyard. The graves of all his people are in that graveyard – the old graveyard which is not now used any more. Urashima Tarō! How can you be so foolish as to ask where his house is?’ And the old man hobbled on, laughing at the simplicity of his questioner.

  But Urashima went to the village graveyard – the old graveyard that was not used any more – and there he found his own tombstone, and the tombstones of his father and his mother and his kindred, and the tombstones of many others he had known. So old they were, so moss-eaten, that it was very hard to read the names upon them.

  Then he knew himself the victim of some strange illusion, and he took his way back to the beach – always carrying in his hand the box, the gift of the Sea God’s daughter. But what was this illusion? And what could be in that box? Or might not that which was in the box be the cause of the illusion? Doubt mastered faith. Recklessly he broke the promise made to his beloved; he loosened the silken cord; he opened the box!

  Instantly, without any sound, there burst from it a white cold spectral vapor that rose in air like a summer cloud, and began to drift away swiftly into the south, over the silent sea. There was nothing else in the box.

  And Urashima then knew that he had destroyed his own happiness – that he could never again return to his beloved, the daughter of the Ocean King. So that he wept and cried out bitterly in his despair.

  Yet for a moment only. In another, he himself was changed. An icy chill shot throug
h all his blood; his teeth fell out; his face shriveled; his hair turned white as snow; his limbs withered; his strength ebbed; he sank down lifeless on the sand, crushed by the weight of four hundred winters.

  Now in the official annals of the Emperors it is written that ‘in the twenty-first year of the Mikado Yuriaku, the boy Urashima of Midzunoyé, in the district of Yosa, in the province of Tango, a descendant of the divinity Shimanemi, went to Elysium [Hōrai] in a fishing-boat.’ After this there is no more news of Urashima during the reigns of thirty-one emperors and empresses – that is, from the fifth until the ninth century. And then the annals announce that ‘in the second year of Tenchiyō, in the reign of the Mikado Go-Junwa,7 the boy Urashima returned, and presently departed again, none knew whither.’fn2

  III

  The fairy mistress came back to tell me that everything was ready, and tried to lift my valise in her slender hands – which I prevented her from doing, because it was heavy. Then she laughed, but would not suffer that I should carry it myself, and summoned a sea-creature with Chinese characters upon his back. I made obeisance to her; and she prayed me to remember the unworthy house despite the rudeness of the maidens. ‘And you will pay the kurumaya,’8 she said, ‘only seventy-five sen.’9, 10

  Then I slipped into the vehicle; and in a few minutes the little gray town had vanished behind a curve. I was rolling along a white road overlooking the shore. To the right were pale brown cliffs; to the left only space and sea.

  Mile after mile I rolled along that shore, looking into the infinite light. All was steeped in blue – a marvelous blue, like that which comes and goes in the heart of a great shell. Glowing blue sea met hollow blue sky in a brightness of electric fusion; and vast blue apparitions – the mountains of Higo – angled up through the blaze, like masses of amethyst. What a blue transparency! The universal color was broken only by the dazzling white of a few high summer clouds, motionlessly curled above one phantom peak in the offing. They threw down upon the water snowy tremulous lights. Midges of ships creeping far away seemed to pull long threads after them – the only sharp lines in all that hazy glory. But what divine clouds! White purified spirits of clouds, resting on their way to the beatitude of Nirvana? Or perhaps the mists escaped from Urashima’s box a thousand years ago?