href="#u4c3c4f8f-b063-5801-9738-829e208418b9">Hoichi the Earless
Enma Daio
The Eight Hells
Bibliography and Recommended Reading
This book is dedicated to Tokyo’s scariest resident, Oiwa-san, who’s been putting the fear into Japan for close to two centuries and counting.
Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.
Copyright © 2012 Hiroko Yoda and Matt Alt
Illustrations © 2012 Satoko Tanaka
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Yoda, Hiroko.
Yurei attack! : the Japanese ghost survival guide / Hiroko Yoda and Matt Alt ; illustrations by Shinkichi. -- 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-4629-0892-9 (ebook)
1. Ghosts--Japan. I. Alt, Matt. II. Title.
BF1472.J3Y63 2012
133.10952--dc23
2012001804
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INTRODUCTION
Do you believe in ghosts?
Generations upon generations of Japanese did. Many still do. This book is a collection of a nation’s “conventional wisdom” on the topic. We didn’t make up a single ghost or story that appears in the pages that follow. They’re all completely “real” — real in the sense that they inhabit the historical and literary record. We scoured these for tales of terror from beyond the grave, pulling together as much background and context as we could. The sole embellishments are the new illustrations that adorn each profile.
While this may be a survival guide, get any thoughts of playing junior exorcist out of your head right now. The best you can hope for in the event of an encounter is to make it out alive. And if generations of ghost stories are to be believed, there are plenty of opportunities for ghost encounters in the islands of Japan. They were, and some say still are, very much a part of daily life there.
幽霊
Yurei
The Japanese word for ghost is yurei. They are the souls of dead people, unable — or unwilling — to shuffle off this mortal coil for whatever reason. The general concept is similar to that of ghosts in the Western world: an ethereal essence of a formerly living being that remains after death. Just as in the West, some yurei haunt a specific person or place; others tend to roam freely.
But the similarities with foreign ghosts end there. In the West, spooks come out for Halloween. In Japan, spirits of all kinds are most active during the summer months, for that is the time of the Obon holiday — the festival of the dead, when the spirits of loved ones are welcomed home from the hereafter for their annual visit.
Abroad,
