For example, the ghost of a first wife who died while giving birth returns to confront the successor who cast an evil spell against her, and rips her head off. Around a third of the tales concern ghosts, often of the jealous, vengeful type. Said to be the original hyaku monogatari collection, One Hundred Tales from Many Lands consists of five volumes with stories from Tōhoku in the north to Kyūshū in the south.
(Courtesy Center for Open Data in the Humanities) The wife of a man called Abe Sōbei dies of sickness after he treats her badly, and returns as a spirit to wreak her revenge.
The preface to One Hundred Tales from Many Lands drew in readers through claims to authenticity propped up by details of who had experienced the events and where.”įrom the third volume of One Hundred Tales from Many Lands. “Rather than tightly constructed narratives,” explains Yumoto, “they mimicked gatherings with stories playing up personal connections to the tellers, like ‘this tale has been passed down in such-and-such a location’ and ‘I heard this from a certain somebody.’ In this way they put together stories based on what participants said they had seen and heard. What kind of stories were included in collections? Ghostly pictures on hanging scrolls attracted participants to gatherings, and artists like Katsushika Hokusai also took on the theme in colored woodblock prints.” “It wasn’t possible to distribute large numbers of handwritten books, so the widespread adoption of woodblock printing helped drive the popularity of the ‘hundred tales’ collections. Katsushika Hokusai, Hyaku monogatari: Sarayashiki (One Hundred Tales: Dish Mansion). He explains that in the same way that a phrase like yaoyorozu (written 八百万, meaning 8 million) in Japanese simply indicates a huge number, 100 just meant “many stories.” Of the various collections like Shokoku hyaku monogatari (One Hundred Tales from Many Lands 1677) and Otogi hyaku monogatari (One Hundred Fantastic Tales 1706), with the number in their titles, only the first actually contained the number of tales indicated.
“They called them ‘a hundred tales,’ but they didn’t necessarily tell that exact number of scary stories,” Yumoto says. While the origins are unclear, they are believed to derive from tests of courage for samurai in the Muromachi period (1333–1568), which later spread among the common people as a pastime in the Edo period. When the final candle is extinguished, and the listeners are plunged into darkness, it is said that something strange and terrifying will happen.
YOKAI SHROOK SERIES
They are based on a legend about lighting a number of candles and putting them out, one at a time, after telling each of a series of frightening tales. At this time, hyaku monogatari (100 tales) collections were hugely popular at every level of society, whether as books or at storytelling gatherings. Yumoto Kōichi, a researcher of yōkai (supernatural spirits and monsters), says Japan has an unbroken tradition of culture based on appreciating the thrills of terror that dates back to the Edo period (1603–1868). Summer 2020, however, saw socially distanced drive-in haunted houses and real-time horror experiences delivered via Skype and Zoom. Haunted house attractions are meant to counter the heat of the season with the chills of a good scare. The COVID-19 pandemic forced cancelations of festivals and firework displays in Japan this summer, but one traditional custom survived, albeit in altered form.
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