Halloween is almost upon us. Cue the Pumpkin Spice Lattes and the children going door to door, telling Dad-jokes and demanding their plastic buckets be filled with sweets.
Oh for a proper scare: the thrill that comes with sensing that we may share our world with forces we cannot see; that what some call ‘consensus reality’ really is just that - an agreement about what is out there and what is not, bequeathed to us by the times in which we live and amounting, perhaps (who knows?), to a collective blindness.
Once upon a time, the Japanese had a well-developed sense of a thin veil separating our everyday world from whatever else is out there, at once beyond us and amongst us.
So let me take you back to 1830 and a gathering in a guest-house…
Wandering late at night, you come across an old guest-house. Candlelight within lends its paper windows a welcoming glow. Sliding open the door, you find a group of people seated on tatami mats around a low table. They are taking it in turns to tell stories:
There was once a samurai named Ogiwara, who had lost his much-loved wife and was now terribly alone in the world. One summer’s night, during the Festival of Souls, he saw a beautiful young woman pass by his house. Her maid, walking alongside her, carried in her hand a bright lantern decorated with peony flowers.
Inviting them in, Ogiwara learned that the young woman lived close to a famous Buddhist temple, and that her aristocratic family had fallen on hard times. Ogiwara was greatly moved by her story, and the two of them carried on talking until dawn. When they parted, they pledged eternal love to one another.
From then on, the woman visited Ogiwara every evening, always bidding him farewell just as the sun came up the next morning. One night, hearing voices from next-door, Ogiwara’s neighbour took a peek into his house – and was horrified by what he saw. Ogiwara was deep in conversation with a skeleton.
Warned by his neighbour that his life was in danger, Ogiwara set off in search of the woman’s home. Upon reaching the grounds of the Buddhist temple, he discovered not a house but a shrine. At its heart sat a coffin.
Terrified, Ogiwara bought a Buddhist protection charm to hang off the gate of his home. The nocturnal visits duly stopped, and all was well until one day, after drinking too much saké, Ogiwara found himself drawn back to the temple. The woman appeared at once, and dragged Ogiwara inside. His body was found there the next day, draped over her coffin.
Sometimes, on rainy nights when the moon is obscured by cloud, Ogiwara and the woman can still be seen drifting along the road with their maid. Disaster is sure to befall anyone who encounters them. The only warning that a victim will receive is the approach of a faint orb of light, shining forth from a peony lantern.
His tale told, the man reaches over towards a large paper lamp, and extinguishes one of the flaming candle wicks inside with a pinch of his fingers.
The room is silent for a moment. Then another man clears his throat:
I know of a very different samurai, Iemon. He had a wife, Oiwa, and a young baby son – and he hated them both. Oiwa was frail, the boy was a nuisance, and Iemon was forced to make oil-paper umbrellas to support them.
So offensive was all this to Iemon’s pride as a samurai that he hatched a plot with a wealthy doctor named Lord Itō, whose young grand-daughter, Oume, had fallen in love with him. They sent a poisoned face cream to Oiwa, causing her the most terrible agony and disfigurement. The skin on the left-hand side of her face swelled and sagged; her left eye bulged and drooped down over her cheek. When Oiwa combed her hair, huge bloody clumps came out and fell to the floor.
Catching sight of herself in the mirror, and realising her husband’s betrayal, Oiwa was plunged into a distress so intense that it killed her. She died cursing Iemon’s name. When Iemon’s servant discovered the truth, Iemon killed him. He nailed the two bodies to a wooden door, one on each side, and threw the door into a river.
Iemon married Oume, and moved into Lord Itō’s mansion. But on their wedding night, when Oume lifted her head towards Iemon, he saw the ruined face of Oiwa staring back. Terrified, Iemon drew his sword and cut off her head. Next, he saw his servant sitting in the corner, eating his baby son. He cut off his head, too. When at last Iemon came to his senses, he realised that the spirit of Oiwa had had her revenge: tricking him into killing her enemies, Oume and Lord Itō.
Iemon was now wanted for murder. His mother, who loved her son despite all that he had done, carved a wooden tombstone for him: the authorities would not go looking for a dead man. The spirit of poor Oiwa, on the other hand, was not so easily deceived. Though Iemon escaped to an old, abandoned house, she soon found him there. Day and night, she tormented him: looming over him, shrieking, sending snakes slithering across the floor whenever he tried to sleep.
Iemon was cast into a madness from which he never emerged.
Once he has finished his story, this man, too, snuffs out one of the candles in the lamp. As the story-telling goes on through the night – fox-gods, giant spiders, women whose bodies are formed from snow – a room that started out illuminated by one hundred candles becomes so dark that around the table only shadowy, anxious faces can now be seen.
This is a game.
The ‘Gathering of One Hundred Strange Tales’ (hyakumonogatari kaidankai) was popular across Japan during the 1700s and early 1800s. For some, it was a way to pass a long, wintry evening. For others, it was something more: a summoning. People believed that when the last candle went out, one of the ghosts, demons, gods or monsters about whom they had been speaking would join them in the pitch-black. Samurai with blood on their hands and good reason to fear visitors from beyond the grave regarded a Gathering as a serious test of resolve.
Fresh stories from faraway places were always highly prized on these occasions, so as a visitor you would not be watching for long before someone beckoned you over and invited you to play.
What tale would you tell? The Lady of the Lake? The Beast of Bodmin Moor? Something from Mount Olympus or Asgard, perhaps: Artemis and Dionysus, Freyja and Thor.
And when the final candle was extinguished, would you humour your hosts – pretending to share their dreadful anticipation – or would fear come naturally enough?
It’s often said that the foundations of folk tales and mythologies lie in attempts to explain the unexplained or to justify the rule of one group of people over another. Not quite – or, at least, not just. A Gathering was intended to kindle in its players a primal awe of the unknown, of the untameable strangeness of life.
If we were serious about Halloween, we’d send our children - alone - to some remote place, there to wander in the pitch black until they were overcome with panic or dread or by something harder to define. They would come back to us chastened and changed, perhaps able to see and sense more than their parents can.
Alas, my daughters just want to dress up, hassle our neighbours and then gorge themselves on sugar.
All the same, I’ll be looking out for the glow of a peony lantern as we go…
Images:
The inn is AI-generated using Freepik.
The Peony Lantern comes from Japan Italy Bridge (fair use).