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Ghosts on the Shore

Saturday, August 11, 2018 11:34

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Christopher Harding has an interesting piece in Aeon. His subject is Japanese ghosts, their complex relationship to modern life and what they might have to say about modern secular cultures.

It was a moonlit night in early summer, about a year on from the great tsunami. As waves broke gently on a beach half-obscured in fog, Fukuji could just about make out two people walking along: a woman and a man.

Fukuji frowned. The woman was definitely his wife.

He called out her name. She turned, and smiled. Fukuji now saw who the man was, too. He had been in love with Fukuji’s wife before Fukuji had married her. Both had died in the tsunami.

Fukuji’s wife called to him, over her shoulder: ‘I am married now, to this man.’

‘But don’t you love your children?’ Fukuji cried out in reply. His wife paused at that, and began to sob.

Fukuji looked sadly at his feet for a moment, not knowing what more to say. When he looked up, the woman and the man had drifted away.

From Tōno Monogatari or Legends of Tōno (1910) by Kunio Yanagita, author’s translation

This is a true story. Or so the man who wrote it down wanted his readers to believe. Kunio Yanagita was one of Japan’s first folklorists. He collected such tales from the village of Tōno in Japan’s northeastern Tōhoku region, publishing them as the Legends of Tōno in 1910. His hope was to rekindle in the inhabitants of big, modern cities such as Tokyo and Osaka the feel of nature’s mystery and magic – the unknowns of the world – which, Yanagita worried, these people had of late begun to lose, mislaying it amid the noise and smog and reassuring distractions of urban life.

Not usually my kind of perspective, but I certainly found myself wondering why that might be. The whole piece is well worth reading. This gem for example.

Yanagita, for his part, was at pains to point out at the beginning of his Legends that he had recorded stories such as Fukuji’s exactly as he had ‘felt’ them. This, he hoped, would be a means of preserving and transmitting around Japan something of the way that the people of Tōno experienced life: as yet untouched, or untainted, by gakusha kusai koto, or things that ‘stink of the [modern] scholar’.

Things that stink of the modern scholar – who doesn’t know that aroma?

Source: https://akhaart.blogspot.com/2018/08/ghosts-on-shore.html

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