Supernatural and Mysterious Japan. Catrien Ross

      There is always a beginning, and looking back, perhaps the idea behind this book first took hold in February 1993. At that time I was living in a run-down, traditional, Japanese-style house I had heard was connected with Koizumi Yakumo, also known as Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904). Details of this link were hazy, but as a writer I liked to think of this drafty old structure as somehow having inspired that long-dead chronicler of Japan’s ghostly and weird. Already I felt sad that I could only be here for a short time, and hoped I would find another place in the neighborhood.

      Although the interior was inconvenient and cold, especially in winter, I had taken this room because the rent was reasonable for central Tokyo, and, what’s more, my windows opened out to a large garden filled with birds and sheltering trees. Owned by the adjacent Buddhist temple, the house itself seemed to sit right in the cemetery, and coming home late at night, I was often startled by the wooden markers at graves clattering in the wind like old bones.

      One morning I had just pulled shut the wooden gate and turned into the street, when I saw a Japanese woman who looked at me intently. We walked silently in the same direction for a few minutes, when suddenly she turned to me and asked, in English, “You are living in that old house?” I nodded, and she then explained that the house had been lived in by the Koizumi Yakumo family, and that she personally knew Lafcadio Hearn’s grandson, and his beautiful wife. She also knew their son, who was now in Matsue, Shimane Prefecture, researching his famous great-grandfather. The woman, Shizuko, was also from Matsue, but her father had bought land here in Tokyo some thirty-five years ago. She seemed delighted to learn I was from Scotland, because twenty years previously she had lived with her husband in London, and among her most precious memories was a journey to Scotland, and a visit to the Edinburgh Festival.

      At the station she introduced me to a waiting friend, and the three of us boarded the train together. Just before Shizuko got off, she asked me how long I would be staying in the house. I said I would soon be leaving, and while I had arranged the following month’s accommodation, after that I did not know where I would stay. Right there and then she offered me a house belonging to her father but now used by her niece, who was leaving to live in America for ten months. If I wanted the house, about an eight-minute walk away from my current home, she would check with her father, and we could talk again that evening.

      Mulling over our extraordinary encounter, I called her back in the late afternoon,just to make sure it had all been real. She felt exactly the same way, and told me that for some reason she had felt overwhelmingly compelled to talk with me that morning, although I was a complete stranger and a foreigner, as well. Thinking things over, she concluded that the ghost of Lafcadio Hearn had arranged our meeting.

      And so I moved into a house in the same neighborhood, a single-story, furnished dwelling with its own garden. On my first day there, a bird, just like one I had been feeding from my window, perched on my laundry pole and squawked loudly at me.

      As I had experienced a number of strange happenings in what I named the “Koizumi house,” the entire incident with Shizuko simply fueled my growing awareness of the hidden currents that move beneath the surface of everyday life. In fact, 1993 turned out to be not only a year of the increasingly mysterious, but also a major, personal turning point. By the end of the year my life had changed dramatically, and my involvement with the supernatural and Japan’s world of “superpower,” as supernatural abilities are often called in Japan, became intense and irrevocable.

      One evening I returned to the Koizumi house to find a Japanese man, Abe Yukio, waiting for me at the cemetery. Several months before, he had by chance picked up the telephone when I was calling about renting the house, and we had briefly talked, but not yet met in person. Now he had come to talk with me about Oriental medicine, which I was researching for an article. Although we did not have contact again until many months later, when he came to treat my backache, today he and I run a clinic together in Nishi Hachioji. I am a healer who also gives therapy involving the analysis and adjustment of the patient’s flow of ki, the natural energy that

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