Yurei Attack!. Hiroko Yoda

      Claim to Fame

      Spirits don’t always represent the souls of the dead. A textbook case in point concerns that of Lady Rokujo, a high-ranking courtesan in the Imperial court of the Heian era, a thousand years ago. She was the source of an extremely rare and quite dangerous phenomenon known as an ikiryo — a sense of resentment so powerful that it separates from the human body to stalk victims, often without the owner’s awareness or consent.

      The Story

      Lady Rokujo’s story is one of the most famous episodes in The Tale of Genji, an eleventh-century work of fiction considered by many scholars to represent the world’s first modern novel.

      In the Imperial courts of Heian Japan, discretion and control of one’s emotions were paramount to the nobility. This even extended to romantic affairs, which were conducted obliquely, with the pursuer and his prospective partner separated by screens, communicating at first almost exclusively by exchanging lines of poetry. Even the ends of relationships followed a proscribed trajectory, with a man expected to sooner or later move on to another conquest and the woman expected to quietly acquiesce to his departure. Human nature being what it is, however, things didn’t always play out according to protocol.

      Married to the Crown Prince, Rokujo was but a hair’s breadth away from becoming Empress of Japan. But the untimely death of her husband stripped Lady Rokujo of her rarefied status and consigned her to social purgatory at the ripe age of twenty-seven (an old biddy by the standards of the day). Then she found herself involved in a quiet but torrid affair with a younger man: the legendarily frisky aristocrat-playboy Hikaru Genji.

      Ladykiller though he was, Genji quickly found himself swept away by Rokujo’s beauty, wit, and elegance, and they carried on discreetly, if not in exact secrecy, for some time. But Genji, a rising star in the Imperial court, found himself increasingly saddled with duties both official (attending ceremonies) and unofficial (attending to the ever-growing number of conquests he’d racked up among the court’s various ladies-in-waiting). And to top it off, he reconciled with his legal wife, the Lady Aoi, now pregnant with his child. Sidelined from the one source of pleasure in her life, Lady Rokujo had already gone into a slow burn. But when a member of Aoi’s retinue “dissed” her in public, Rokujo’s resentment flared to life. Literally.

      The Attack

      Night after night, Lady Rokujo sank deep into dreams that dissolved into a repeating nightmare. In them, she found herself hovering over the sleeping Lady Aoi, whom she brutally snatched by the arm and proceeded to drag, strike, and whip against the walls of the bedchamber in fits of violence utterly alien to her reserved waking self.

      These were no ordinary dreams. Aoi actually fell ill, taking to her sickbed for the remainder of her pregnancy, weeping inconsolably, and lapsing into choking fits. She wailed that “something alien” had entered into her. The best onmyoji exorcists money could buy divined that some tremendous accumulation of malice had erupted like a pox upon her soul, but were powerless to stop it; the best they could do was arrange a séance between Genji and the spirit inhabiting Aoi, in the hopes he could soothe its anger.

      Surviving an Attack

      The most insidious aspect of the ikiryo is that the individual generating it often remains completely unaware of the fatal effects their jealousy is having upon others. In this case, it is fortunate both that the Lady Rokujo connected her dreams with the sufferings of the Lady Aoi and that she was at heart a good woman. In spite of the humiliations she had suffered, Rokujo truly wished no physical harm upon Genji’s wife or child. She focused her entire being on trying to banish her lover from her thoughts — no mean feat, as anyone who has deliberately tried to forget something will know. While Rokujo did not exactly succeed, the effort combined with the séance caused the ikiryo to release its hold. Unfortunately, though Aoi subsequently gave birth to a healthy baby boy, the combined strain of the pregnancy and psychic attack contributed to her death from natural causes several days later.

      Fortunately, ikiryo attacks are extraordinarily uncommon. They cannot be generated at will, or by pure hate; in Lady Rokujo’s case, it required the psychological “tinder” of abandonment and frustrated love, inflamed by an insult, to spark its existence. If you believe you or someone you love is suffering from an attack by an ikiryo, the best solution is to rack your brains to determine whom you may have wronged, and come up with a way to address the problem that does not involve shutting them out. In The Tale of Genji, the ikiryo is portrayed as much as the fault of Genji as that of the woman who unwittingly spawned it.

      The English translation of “The Tale of Genji”.

      Trivia

      Ikiryo are particularly problematic sorts of spooks — in many ways even more so than spirits of the dead. They are an extreme manifestation of that all too common human failing: holding a grudge. The negative energy and actions resulting from grudges are a powerful enough force even at levels below those needed to create a ferocious doppelganger. Addressing the hate and negativity that fuels an ikiryo is a far more difficult task than carrying out the measures needed to exorcize the spirits of the dead.

      There is an intriguing potential connection between ikiryo and the yokai known as nuke-kubi (See Yokai Attack!). Nuke-kubi are female creatures whose heads separate from their bodies and take flight of their own accord. According to some theories, these yokai were once normal women who, through years of suppressing their feelings for another, have lost control of an important bit of their anatomy, which takes to the skies in search of their unrequited love. In these cases it is infatuation rather than hate that fuels the transformation.

      Aoi may not have been the only victim of Lady Rokujo’s “living ghost.” A girl named Yugao (“Moon flower”), another of Genji’s girlfriends, died under mysterious circumstances as well. Print by Yoshitoshi, 1886.