Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things
“It is time that I should tell you something which you do not know. My
prayer has been heard. I besought Fudō-Sama that I might be permitted
to die in the place of O-Tsuyu; and this great favor has been granted
me. Therefore you must not grieve about my death... But I have one
request to make. I promised Fudō-Sama that I would have a cherry-tree
planted in the garden of Saihōji, for a thank-offering and a
commemoration. Now I shall not be able myself to plant the tree there:
so I must beg that you will fulfill that vow for me... Good-bye, dear
friends; and remember that I was happy to die for O-Tsuyu’s sake.”
After the funeral of O-Sodé, a young cherry-tree,—the finest that could
be found,—was planted in the garden of Saihōji by the parents of
O-Tsuyu. The tree grew and flourished; and on the sixteenth day of the
second month of the following year,—the anniversary of O-Sodé’s
death,—it blossomed in a wonderful way. So it continued to blossom for
two hundred and fifty-four years,—always upon the sixteenth day of the
second month;—and its flowers, pink and white, were like the nipples of
a woman’s breasts, bedewed with milk. And the people called it
_Ubazakura_, the Cherry-tree of the Milk-Nurse.
DIPLOMACY
It had been ordered that the execution should take place in the garden
of the _yashiki_ (1). So the man was taken there, and made to kneel
down in a wide sanded space crossed by a line of _tobi-ishi_, or
stepping-stones, such as you may still see in Japanese
landscape-gardens. His arms were bound behind him. Retainers brought
water in buckets, and rice-bags filled with pebbles; and they packed
the rice-bags round the kneeling man,—so wedging him in that he could
not move. The master came, and observed the arrangements. He found them
satisfactory, and made no remarks.
Suddenly the condemned man cried out to him:—
“Honored Sir, the fault for which I have been doomed I did not
wittingly commit. It was only my very great stupidity which caused the
fault. Having been born stupid, by reason of my Karma, I could not
always help making mistakes. But to kill a man for being stupid is
wrong,—and that wrong will be repaid. So surely as you kill me, so
surely shall I be avenged;—out of the resentment that you provoke will
come the vengeance; and evil will be rendered for evil.”...
If any person be killed while feeling strong resentment, the ghost of
that person will be able to take vengeance upon the killer. This the
samurai knew. He replied very gently,—almost caressingly:—
“We shall allow you to frighten us as much as you please—after you are
dead. But it is difficult to believe that you mean what you say. Will
you try to give us some sign of your great resentment—after your head
has been cut off?”
“Assuredly I will,” answered the man.
“Very well,” said the samurai, drawing his long sword;—“I am now going
to cut off your head. Directly in front of you there is a
stepping-stone. After your head has been cut off, try to bite the
stepping-stone. If your angry ghost can help you to do that, some of us
may be frightened... Will you try to bite the stone?”
“I will bite it!” cried the man, in great anger,—“I will bite it!—I
will bite”—
There was a flash, a swish, a crunching thud: the bound body bowed over
the rice sacks,—two long blood-jets pumping from the shorn neck;—and
the head rolled upon the sand. Heavily toward the stepping-stone it
rolled: then, suddenly bounding, it caught the upper edge of the stone
between its teeth, clung desperately for a moment, and dropped inert.
None spoke; but the retainers stared in horror at their master. He
seemed to be quite unconcerned. He merely held out his sword to the
nearest attendant, who, with a wooden dipper, poured water over the
blade from haft to point, and then carefully wiped the steel several
times with sheets of soft paper... And thus ended the ceremonial part
of the incident.
For months thereafter, the retainers and the domestics lived in
ceaseless fear of ghostly visitation. None of them doubted that the
promised vengeance would come; and their constant terror caused them to
hear and to see much that did not exist. They became afraid of the
sound of the wind in the bamboos,—afraid even of the stirring of
shadows in the garden. At last, after taking counsel together, they
decided to petition their master to have a _Ségaki_-service (2)
performed on behalf of the vengeful spirit.
“Quite unnecessary,” the samurai said, when his chief retainer had
uttered the general wish... “I understand that the desire of a dying
man for revenge may be a cause for fear. But in this case there is
nothing to fear.”
The retainer looked at his master beseechingly, but hesitated to ask
the reason of the alarming confidence.
“Oh, the reason is simple enough,” declared the samurai, divining the
unspoken doubt. “Only the very last intention of the fellow could have
been dangerous; and when I challenged him to give me the sign, I
diverted his mind from the desire of revenge. He died with the set
purpose of biting the stepping-stone; and that purpose he was able to
accomplish, but nothing else. All the rest he must have forgotten... So
you need not feel any further anxiety about the matter.”
—And indeed the dead man gave no more trouble. Nothing at all happened.
OF A MIRROR AND A BELL
Eight centuries ago, the priests of Mugenyama, in the province of
Tōtōmi (1), wanted a big bell for their temple; and they asked the
women of their parish to help them by contributing old bronze mirrors
for bell-metal.
[Even to-day, in the courts of certain Japanese temples, you may see
heaps of old bronze mirrors contributed for such a purpose. The largest
collection of this kind that I ever saw was in the court of a temple of
the Jōdo sect, at Hakata, in Kyūshū: the mirrors had been given for the
making of a bronze statue of Amida, thirty-three feet high.]
There was at that time a young woman, a farmer’s wife, living at
Mugenyama, who presented her mirror to the temple, to be used for
bell-metal. But afterwards she much regretted her mirror. She
remembered things that her mother had told her about it; and she
remembered that it had belonged, not only to her mother but to her
mother’s mother and grandmother; and she remembered some happy smiles
which it had reflected. Of course, if she could have offered the
priests a certain sum of money in place of the mirror, she could have
asked them to give back her heirloom. But she had not the money
necessary. Whenever she went to the temple, she saw her mirror lying in
the court-yard, behind a railing, among hundreds of other mirrors
heaped there together. She knew it by the _Shō-Chiku-Bai_ in relief on
the back of it,—those three fortunate emblems of Pine, Bamboo, and
Plumflower, which delighted her baby-eyes when her mother first showed
her the mirror. She longed for some chance to steal the mirror, and
hide it,—that she might thereafter treasure it always. But the chance
did not come; and she became very unhappy,—felt as if she had foolishly
given away a part of her life. She thought about the old saying that a
mirror is the Soul of a Woman—(a saying mystically expressed, by the
Chinese character for Soul, upon the backs of many bronze mirrors),—and
she feared that it was true in weirder ways than she had before
imagined. But she could not dare to speak of her pain to anybody.
Now, when all the mirrors contributed for the Mugenyama bell had been
sent to the foundry, the bell-founders discovered that there was one
mirror among them which would not melt. Again and again they tried to
melt it; but it resisted all their efforts. Evidently the woman who had
given that mirror to the temple must have regretted the giving. She had
not presented her offering with all her heart; and therefore her
selfish soul, remaining attached to the mirror, kept it hard and cold
in the midst of the furnace.
Of course everybody heard of the matter, and everybody soon knew whose
mirror it was that would not melt. And because of this public exposure
of her secret fault, the poor woman became very much ashamed and very
angry. And as she could not bear the shame, she drowned herself, after
having written a farewell letter containing these words:—
“When I am dead, it will not be difficult to melt the mirror and to
cast the bell. But, to the person who breaks that bell by ringing it,
great wealth will be given by the ghost of me.”
—You must know that the last wish or promise of anybody who dies in
anger, or performs suicide in anger, is generally supposed to possess a
supernatural force. After the dead woman’s mirror had been melted, and
the bell had been successfully cast, people remembered the words of
that letter. They felt sure that the spirit of the writer would give
wealth to the breaker of the bell; and, as soon as the bell had been
suspended in the court of the temple, they went in multitude to ring
it. With all their might and main they swung the ringing-beam; but the
bell proved to be a good bell, and it bravely withstood their assaults.
Nevertheless, the people were not easily discouraged. Day after day, at
all hours, they continued to ring the bell furiously,—caring nothing
whatever for the protests of the priests. So the ringing became an
affliction; and the priests could not endure it; and they got rid of
the bell by rolling it down the hill into a swamp. The swamp was deep,
and swallowed it up,—and that was the end of the bell. Only its legend
remains; and in that legend it is called the _Mugen-Kané_, or Bell of
Mugen.
Now there are queer old Japanese beliefs in the magical efficacy of a
certain mental operation implied, though not described, by the verb
_nazoraëru_. The word itself cannot be adequately rendered by any
English word; for it is used in relation to many kinds of mimetic
magic, as well as in relation to the performance of many religious acts
of faith. Common meanings of _nazoraëru_, according to dictionaries,
are “to imitate,” “to compare,” “to liken;” but the esoteric meaning is
_to substitute, in imagination, one object or action for another, so as
to bring about some magical or miraculous result_.
For example:—you cannot afford to build a Buddhist temple; but you can
easily lay a pebble before the image of the Buddha, with the same pious
feeling that would prompt you to build a temple if you were rich enough
to build one. The merit of so offering the pebble becomes equal, or
almost equal, to the merit of erecting a temple... You cannot read the
six thousand seven hundred and seventy-one volumes of the Buddhist
texts; but you can make a revolving library, containing them, turn
round, by pushing it like a windlass. And if you push with an earnest
wish that you could read the six thousand seven hundred and seventy-one
volumes, you will acquire the same merit as the reading of them would
enable you to gain... So much will perhaps suffice to explain the
religious meanings of _nazoraëru_.
The magical meanings could not all be explained without a great variety
of examples; but, for present purposes, the following will serve. If
you should make a little man of straw, for the same reason that Sister
Helen made a little man of wax,—and nail it, with nails not less than
five inches long, to some tree in a temple-grove at the Hour of the Ox
(2),—and if the person, imaginatively represented by that little straw
man, should die thereafter in atrocious agony,—that would illustrate
one signification of _nazoraëru_... Or, let us suppose that a robber
has entered your house during the night, and carried away your
valuables. If you can discover the footprints of that robber in your
garden, and then promptly burn a very large moxa on each of them, the