Japanese Folk Tales and Ghost Stories

Hi everyone!

A few weeks ago, one of you asked about urban legends and ghost stories, and if they were real. So, I spent some time going around and asking people what their favorite ghost story or folk tale was, and today I'm going to share a few of them with you!

Urashima Taro

Long ago, there was a kind young fisherman who lived by the ocean named Urashima Taro. One morning, he noticed some kids being mean to a turtle, so he saved the turtle and released it back into the sea. A couple days later, as he was fishing, the turtle he'd saved swam up to the boat next to him, and told Taro that it wanted to take him to the undersea Dragon Palace as thanks for saving it. Taro agreed to go, and the turtle gave him a ride to the bottom of the sea. There, Taro met the princess of the Dragon Palace, a beautiful woman named Otohime, and the two spent what seemed like a few days having fun in the castle. However, Taro began to get homesick, and wanted to go home to let his parents know that he was alright. Otohime tried to convince him to stay a little longer, but Taro insisted, and so she agreed to help him get back home. Before he left, Otohime gave Taro a magical box, but told him that he must never open it. Taro said goodbye and returned to his village, but what he saw there stunned him. Everything had changed - the buildings were different, none of the villagers were the ones Taro knew from growing up there, and his mother and father had already passed away. In desperation, Taro opened the box that Otohime had given him, and the magic of the box turned him into an old man, sitting alone on the beach.

This kind of story, where things end suddenly and badly for the main character, seems to be pretty common among Japanese folk tales. I asked people what they thought the moral of the story was, and none of them really could give me an answer. I think that a lot of Japanese stories are just stories, instead of how a lot of our fairy tales try to teach us lessons.

Kobutori Jiisan

Long ago, in a small village in the mountains, there lived two old men. They were happy and healthy, but both had a problem - one had a huge lump the size of his fist coming out of his right cheek, and the other had a similar lump, but on his left cheek. They tried everything to get rid of the lumps - doctors, exercise, and praying to the gods to take away the lumps - but nothing worked. One day, one of the old men walked up the mountains to go pray at a shrine to ask the god of the shrine to take it away. When he got there though, he was shocked - a big group of oni (Japanese monsters kind of like ogres) were having a party in the shrine! The old man tried to sneak away, but one of the oni heard him, and ran over and caught the old man. The old man was terrified, but the oni were in a good mood because of the party, so they pushed the old man into the center of their circle and said "Dance for us!" Some of the oni started to play music (badly), and the frightened old man started to dance. It turned out, though, that the old man was a great dancer, and the oni cheered him on and applauded his performance. 

At the end of the party, the oni told him "That was great! You have to come back tomorrow and dance for us again!" The old man was flattered, but really didn't want to spend the rest of his nights dancing with monsters. Seeing his hesitation, a huge red oni said "Fine, to make sure you come back, we'll take something very important of yours so that you have to!", and then reached out, and without a drop of blood or any pain took the lump off the old man's cheek. The old man was overjoyed, but pretended to be disappointed, and said "Of course, I'll be back tomorrow" and returned to his village. When the other old man saw him without the lump, he asked how in the world he'd been able to get rid of it. So the old man told him, and the other old man resolved to go to the shrine and get the oni to take his, too. But when he got to the party, he wasn't as good of a dancer as the other old man, and the oni were disappointed. So the big red oni said "Here, take this, and never come back again!" and put the lump from the first old man onto the cheek of the other, making him now have a lump on both sides.

I like this story, because it shows how Japanese people think about monsters differently than we do. Nobody goes to slay the oni in this story, and the oni aren't really bothering anyone, just having parties up in the mountains. Of course, some are bad and just want to eat people, but some just want to have fun, and don't really mind people that much. It reminds me of some of the stories I heard growing up about Irish and Scottish fairies, where they weren't always bad, just had different morals from humans.

Botan Doro - The Peony Lantern

Long ago, there was a man named Ogiwara who lived in Tokyo. As he was out late one night, he saw a beautiful woman walking with her servant as she held a lantern with a flowery design of peonies on it. Ogiwara, immediately smitten, started talking with her, and the woman told him that her name was Otsuyu. The two had a long conversation, and Ogiwara invited Otsuyu to come back to his house and dance and sing with him, which she did. One of Ogiwara's neighbors, hearing the noise, looked through a window and saw that Ogiwara was dancing with a grinning skeleton, which was nodding and hissing replies when Ogiwara spoke to it. The next day, the neighbor told Ogiwara what he had seen, and told him to go to the temple. There, Ogiwara found the grave of the long-dead Otsuyu, which had an old, tattered peony lantern resting on it. He realized that Otsuyu had been a ghost all along, and asked the priest for advice on what to do. The priest gave him a charm that would ward off spirits, and sure enough, the ghost of Otsuyu did not come back. However, Ogiwara began to miss Otsuyu. After a long time, he could not bear being without her, and returned to her grave at the temple. There, the ghost of Otsuyu was waiting for him, and reached her hand out to him. The next day, nobody could find Ogiwara. Fearing the worst, his neighbors and the priest went to Otsuyu's grave and dug it up, and found the skeletons of Ogiwara and Otsuyu lying there in each other's arms.

I like this story more than some of the other ghost stories that people told me. Sometimes the ghosts were murderous, sometimes they wanted revenge for the things that happened to them in life, but I like how in this one, the ghost of Otsuyu just wanted to find someone nice to spend the afterlife with. I think in a lot of ghost stories, ghosts and the living end up being enemies for some reason or another, but in this one, the couple were able to bridge the gap between them and find happiness together.

There's so many more ghost stories and folk tales than I was able to write here, and there's a lot that are way scarier that you guys can look up (if you're brave enough!). It's interesting to me how the stories that people tell can be wildly different, but are still familiar enough to be enjoyed by people from a different culture or background. Let me know what you guys think about all this!

Until next week,

またね！ (See you soon!)