Kyōgoku Natsuhiko,  una retorica oltre il secondo grado
10.13125/2039-6597/1103
“Descrivere” costituisce una delle problematiche centrali con cui si rapportano sia lo scrittore – e più in generale l'artista -, sia il fruitore di un'opera. Da un lato, infatti, troviamo la difficoltà a elaborare sempre nuove strategie descrittive, dall'altro – come teorizza anche Eco – quella relativa alla ricezione del materiale letterario. Questo processo si rende ancor più complesso, poi, quando l'oggetto descritto evade dai confini del noto e dello scibile, e lambisce quell'area affascinante e al contempo conturbante costituita dal “sovrannaturale”.  È questa la sfida raccolta da Kyōgoku Natsuhiko (1963~ ), autore attivo in Giappone dal 1994 e la cui produzione - al momento in cui scriviamo - consta di oltre quaranta voluminose opere in continua oscillazione tra il fantastico e il mystery. I suoi lavori – che richiedono tutti una lettura transtestuale - si distinguono per lo stretto legame con le creature sovrannaturali del patrimonio culturale autoctono, gli yōkai, i cui ritratti vengono eseguiti da Kyōgoku con un occhio rivolto sia alla tradizione iconografica - in linea con la scuola di letteratura fantastica giapponese del primo novecento - sia alle subculture metropolitane sviluppatesi nel processo di globalizzazione del paese. Attingendo alla letteratura classica, l'autore crea un modello narrativo innovativo, in cui la tradizione è il teatro dove si susseguono complesse tragedie del mondo contemporaneo. L'intervento mira all'analisi delle modalità di trattazione di una figura femminile sovrannaturale presente nelle tradizioni cinese e giapponese, la ubume - la "partoriente fantasma" -, scelta dall'autore come fulcro narrativo della sua opera prima - Ubume no Natsu (L'estate della partoriente fantasma, 1994) -, dramma radicato in uno psicologico femminile espresso tramite le mutazioni dello yōkai.
application/pdf
2039-6597
1103
7
en
Diego Cucinelli
Between
Supernatural
Kyōgoku Natsuhiko,  a rhetoric beyond the second degree
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
4
Our Orients. Otherness, Body, Translation
2014-05-30
2014-02-12
2014-05-27
2014-05-30
1
Diego Cucinelli
2014/05/30
10.13125/2039-6597/1103
Università degli Studi della Tuscia
2039-6597
7
Supernatural
en
Kyōgoku Natsuhiko,  a rhetoric beyond the second degree
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/1103/911
4
                         Kyōgoku Natsuhiko, 	


          a rhetoric beyond the second degree	

                                 Diego Cucinelli	



                                 1. Introduction	

      “Describing” represents one of the central issues in the relationship
between the writer – or, more in general, the artist- and the reader. On the one
hand, the author constantly strives to develop new descriptive writing
strategies. On the other hand, we find the reception of the literary works,
which, as also theorized by Eco1, is quite a difficult process in itself. However,
it may get even more complex when the described object breaks away from
the concept of known and approaches the fascinating and exciting world of the
“supernatural”2. 	

        This is the challenge taken on by Kyōgoku Natsuhiko (京極夏彦, b.
1963). An active author since 1994, he has been widely rewarded and
acclaimed by the public and critique at national level3. His production
constantly sways between fantasy and mystery and is characterized by the
peculiar trans textual dimension in which it develops. The works consist in
hypertexts derived from selected hypo texts from within the literary and
iconographic patrimony of pre-modern Japan. This study aims at analysing
rhetorical methods derived from such rearrangement. In particular, we will
focus on the collection entitled hyakki yagyō (“night parade of one hundred
demons" 百⿁鬼夜⾏行), which appeared shortly after the burst of the bubble

      1   See Eco 2000
      2  As Todorov points out, Fantastic requires the reader to adopt a certain attitude
toward the text, rejecting poetic and allegorical reading which destroy the pure Fan-
tastic. See Todorov 2000
      3	

Among the numerous awards given to the author, we here mention the Izumi
Kyōka Award – granted to mystery novels – and the Naoki Award the most presti-
gious prize for Japanese popular literature.


Between, vol. IV, n. 7 (Maggio/ May 2014)
Diego Cucinelli, Kyōgoku Natsuhiko, a rhetoric beyond the second degree



economy with The Summer of Ubume (Ubume no Natsu 産⼥女の夏, 1994). The
peculiar dimension of the latter highlights a “crisis within the crisis”. The lost
decade4 is the product of a particularly tense historical period and is set in
Tokyo in 1952, year that marks the end of the American occupation5. This is
the background to the spiritual possessions by fake supernatural creatures and
the distortions of individual’s perceptions that follow one another in the
works. An investigator is therefore in charge of re-establishing normal
conditions. He deals with the culprit by applying a Freudian technique, to
which the writer’s hand adds his background knowledge in the field of
exorcism both from Buddhist and Shintō perspectives. 	

       The debut novel
of this collection – to which we will here dedicate a separate case study-
focuses on a creature whose image is the result of a layering of elements taken
from the cultural folklore of geographical regions which are different from
East Asia, and which Kyōgoku reorganizes in order to describe a typically
feminine psychological drama. In The Summer of Ubume, in particular, we
observe a Freudian perspective in its view of fantasy genre – the “return of the
repressed” – which is expressed by the imaginary twenty-month long
pregnancy experienced by the protagonist of the novel, the woman
“possessed” by the supernatural creature which inspired the title of the work.
In this novel it is the rhetoric of fantasy itself which represents the most
amazing element: Kyōgoku’s pen goes far beyond the idea of “literature in the
second degree” seen as a rearrangement of different texts6, and penetrates the
iconographic and supernatural production in post-modern Japan. The journey
into this dimension is characterized by various forms and different shades of
colour, which can frighten and at the same time amaze the reader. The result of
such a journey is a literary subject in which the strokes of the old emakimono
– the “painted scrolls” – melt with the tradition of Japanese Medieval ghost
stories.	





       4	

With
             lost decade we mean the years following the bubble economy, namely
from the early 1990’s to the beginning of the 21st century. See Saxonhouse 2004
       5	

See   Schaller 1987
       6	

Génette   1997: 5-10


2
                                                    Between, vol. IV, n. 7 (Maggio/May 2014)



                2. Kyōgoku and the hyakki yagyō series	

      The yōkai ungaku (妖怪⽂文学) – the “literature of Japanese monsters” –
is the context in which we must place Kyōgoku’s poetry, a separate dimension
within the Japanese fantasy literature (gensō bungaku 幻想⽂文学)7, a style
whose narrative dynamics and rhetoric draw inspiration from the complexity
of autochthonous supernatural creatures (yōkai) and make it the focus of their
aesthetic research8. Midway between folklore, spirituality and art, with their
evident symbolism, yōkai communicate fears and feelings in a way that is
often more incisive than human protagonists, thus constantly proving the close
connection between these supernatural creatures and “society”, as well as the
link between “old” and “modern”. Over the last two centuries, the yōkaigaku –
the Japanese “demonology”9– has made various attempts to systematization.
These have produced different and often contrasting results, probably due to
the very nature of these creatures, often unsteadily swinging between
“good” (zen) and “evil” (aku), while avoiding to be definitely classified in any
way in either of the two spheres. 	

      At the moment, Kyōgoku’s re-writing efforts amount to about forty
works –mainly over a thousand page long novels. The core of its work is the
material concerning these creatures. His poetry is the result of his studies on
the yōkaigaku carried out together with important figures in the field10, to
which he has applied his previously acquired designer’s skills, in order to




      7	

Together
               with the kaiki shōsetsu (“mystery novel”) it is one of the most
common ways to refer to fantasy novels. Napier 1996: 10-25
      8	

In
           an essay of 2002 the critic Higashi draws the attention to the term, to then
analyse it in detail in later works. Others will use it with the expression yōkai shōset-
su (“yōkai novels”). See Higashi 2002; Ichiyanagi 2006
      9	

The
            beginning of the yōkaigaku can be said to be the year 1886, when Inoue
Enryō (1859-1919) - founder of the discipline - set up the Yōkaigaku Kenkyūkai
(Association for Research on supernatural creatures) at the Imperial University of
Tokyo. Komatsu 2007: 20-23
      10	

     Kyōgoku’s production includes scientific articles, which show an im-
portant interest for aspects of the history of yōkaigaku and its secularization. Kyō-
goku 2002: 547-582


                                                                                          3
Diego Cucinelli, Kyōgoku Natsuhiko, a rhetoric beyond the second degree



reinterpret the yōkai from an iconographic point of view11. In fact, it is
Kyōgoku himself who has realised the resin models that appear on his books’
covers and from which we perceive the hand of his maestro, the famous
manga author Mizuki Shigeru (1922-2007)12. Similarly to writers belonging to
previous eras13, he draws from the stylistic features of kaidan productions
(“ghost stories”) and zukan (“illustrated volumes”)14 from the second half of
the Edo period (1603-1867) and applies them to a new type of innovative
novel created for 21st century readers, in which past superstitions and modern
society meet. 	

      As regards identifying palimpsests, Kyōgoku himself provides us with
information and details, by offering quotes in the text and in-depth analysis in
the afterword. In the hyakki yagyō series, which opens with The summer of
ubume and is still in progress, for a total of fourteen elements, he develops a
method of modular re-writing in which references to yōkai belonging to a
particular palimpsest are made, in a narrative context that is chronologically
distant from the dimension of the hypo text. The result is a work based on a
specific superstition, in which the “supernatural” element withdraws within
the logical processes and scientific knowledge that characterize the modern era
in which the novel is set. 	

      Kyōgoku’s palimpsest is Toriyama Sekien’s work (⿃鳥⼭山⽯石燕,
1712-1788), Gazu Hyakki Yagyō (The Illustrated Demoniac Horde 画図百⿁鬼


       11	

    Following his studies in figurative and plastic arts, before devoting
himself to writing, the author works for many years for a designers’ studio.
       12	

    Mizuki Shigeru is one of the best interpreters of contemporary
world’s yōkai-ga. He influenced many generations of Japanese people with his
Gegege no Kitarō (Kitarō of Graveyards, 1960), a series in which the main character
is a boy who is half human half yōkai. It was first launched as a manga and has then
become anime in many remakes. See Papp 2010b
       13	

  Among the many authors, here comes to mind the famous writer Aku-
tagawa Ryūnosuke who, on top of his numerous re-interpretations of indigenous
popular novels, he also wrote works that revolve around the image of a yōkai. See
Ceci 1995
       14	

   It is an encyclopaedic production developed from the honzōgaku,
Chinese “herbalism” in the Six Dynasties Period (220-589). In this and similar
works, every type of life known to man is recorded, animal or plant, and often the
text is accompanied by an illustration. Komatsu 2007: 5-30


4
                                                    Between, vol. IV, n. 7 (Maggio/May 2014)



夜⾏行, 1776)15, a catalogue of yōkai – for a total of 206 – in which each
creature is represented by a sashi-e (“illustration”), and in some cases, it is
also followed by a brief note on the relative superstition. Sekien’s work offers
a broad view over ghosts and widely known legendary creatures such as tengu,
kappa16 and tsukumogami ("animated tools 付喪神)17 as well as less famous
figures – maybe even created by the author himself18 – such as shirachigo –
the “white valet”19 – and shiranui (lit. “unknown flame”), a Japanese monster
belonging to the group of “supernatural flames” (kaika)20. As we are writing,
thirty-six yōkai have been brought back to life in Kyōgoku’s pages. Thirty of
those have been created since 1999, while in the first five years of work only
six had been produced. This is due to a variation in the literary format of the
hyakki yagyō in the course of production. If in the “first period” (1994-1998)
the author chooses the “long novel” style, in 1999 – year marked by the
publication of Demoniac Horde – Shadow (Hyakki Yagyō – In) – he launches a
parallel style of tanpenshū (“collection of short stories”), in which he includes
various narrations with different yōkai thematic focus, without, however, ever
mixing them. Already in the Muromachi period (1337-1573) we find rolls
depicting parades of demons and other grotesque creatures. However, Sekien
and Kyōgoku’s approach to emakimono, based on yōkai themes and previous

      15	

     The catalogue is composed of four elements, each one of which is di-
vided into three sections containing a variable number of yōkai, from nine to a max-
imum of twenty-two. See Toriyama 2010
      16	

     Very popular figures in the folklore: the first is an altered crow, whose
origins are in India, while the second is a river dweller who enjoys making fun of
men. See Miyake 2006 and 2008
      17	

     Tsukumogami are yōkai born out of artefacts and other objects of var-
ious types, in particular musical instruments and household furnishing connected to
Buddhist practices. See Reider 2009
      18	

    According to a study carried out by the scholar Kondō, some yōkai
which make up the series are not taken from pre-existing material, but are rather cre-
ated from scratch by Sekien who got his inspiration from obsolete toponyms and per-
sonal names. Kondō 2012: 79-83
      19	

     A peculiar yōkai of which we find traces only in Sekien’s work. It is
portrayed as a young man with grotesque features busy writing down on paper what
dictated by his boss, an inugami (“dog-god”). Toriyama 2010: 16
      20	

    Toriyama Sekien 2010: 88; Mizuki and Murakami 2006: 177-178


                                                                                          5
Diego Cucinelli, Kyōgoku Natsuhiko, a rhetoric beyond the second degree



to Gazu Hyakki Yagyō21, is to isolate the single creatures, meaning that they
are not shown as a single flow, they are rather framed in individual settings,
thus giving each one of them total independence. The title given to each short
story corresponds to the name of a Japanese monster, just as for the sashi-e of
Edo’s zukan: the connotation intrinsic to the creature allows Kyōgoku to set up
his narrative frame on the solid foundations of a social imaginary that has
taken shape over the centuries and which is flexible enough to be re-
interpreted. The result is a fragmented “parade of demons” –or, using a
contemporary expression, a slide show – in which the symbolism typical of
yōkai sets the topic of the novel, from the concept of “jealousy” in Jōrōgumo
no Kotowari (The Spider-woman’s Mind, 1996) to the “broken promise”
expressed by the narigama – the “crying pot” – by Tsurezure bukuro - Ame
(Stories of Inanimate Objects – Rain, 1999).	

       If a rewriting process that emphasizes content over form seems limited
because the palimpsest itself lacks textual parts, it is rather in the formal
aspects and in the peritextual choices – such as the introduction of Sekien’s
sashi-e in the title page – that it is most evident. The sequence in which
creatures appear is here turned upside down: among some of the examples we
could give, we here mention the fifth yōkai described by Kyōgoku, the
“spider-woman” (jōrōgumo)22, which is found in the second element of the
first volume of Sekien’s series; moreover, Stories of animate objects, which,
despite drawing exclusively from the third maki of Gazu Hyakki Yagyō, it
completely changes the internal disposition of the narration. On the contrary,
Sekien’s choice of dedicating a separate section to the tsukumogami is
maintained and the image of the yōkai as an outsider to the rest of the world, is
thus shared by the two authors. 	

       	

 The series is composed of original narrations created by Kyōgoku, who
has distanced the spatial and time setting from the dimension of the hypo text
in order to locate it in 1950’s Tokyo: mysterious events, only apparently
connected to the supernatural, but rather explained through Freudian
psychoanalysis, follow one another in a constant relocation between reality
and superstition. The elements connected to the yōkai are presented as

       21	

     Among the many examples, we here refer to the Hyakki Yagyō Emaki
(Illustrated rolls of the demonic horde, 15th cent.), an important work for Sekien and
consequently Kyōgoku’s writings. Tanaka 2007; Lillehoj 2007
       22	

   It is a female yōkai who looks like a hybrid being half human half-
spider. Toriyama Sekien 2010: 27


6
                                                    Between, vol. IV, n. 7 (Maggio/May 2014)



“possessions” (hyōi), distortions of the perception which lead the individual to
act unconsciously thus following the path traced by myth. The technique used
by Chūzenji Akihito – the series’ mystery solver – is referred to as tsukimono
otoshi (exorcism 憑物落とし) and – according to the critic Nagase23 – seems
partly retrieved from Jungian therapy. This theory is supported by the
numerous references made to the Swiss psychoanalyst in Kyōgoku’s pages.
The investigator gains the upper hand by sowing the seed of doubt in the
“possessed person’s mind”. He thus takes down the wall of superstition, in line
with the motto he often pronounces «Nothing is supernatural in this world,
Sekiguchi!»24. When the “identification” has successfully taken place, the
“patient” regains possession of his or her own free will. If this does not take
place, the “patient” projects onto him or herself the total responsibility of their
actions without, however, getting rid of the “shadow”25. An example of this is
represented by the protagonist of Jōrōgumo no Kotowari, now incapable of
wiggling out of the web that she has herself made in order to carry out a
carnage. 	

      The hyakki yagyō series portrays a country that is making a vain attempt
to leave its past behind: change is everywhere- at political, social and urban
level- and in this spirit of renovation, “identity” seems so unstable that the
characters fall prey to superstitions typical of an old world that “modernity”
does not manage to undermine, thus showing how strongly the supernatural is
again felt in Japan at the time of the American occupation. The characters’
dialogues reveal their liable psychological conditions, and the repeated use of
terms referring to Japanese monsters, also by people who are alien to the
supernatural world, thickens the ghostly veil that wraps the novel. In the
words of inspector Kiba – the “representative of the law” in the detective story
-, for instance, we find images concerning the Supernatural used to pass
judgement on the represented society. In the man’s speech, a survivor of World
War II, the very idea of “justice” (seigi) is correlated to the concept of
“ghost” (obake), thus underlining the idea that past values are now only a
vague ghost of what they once were.	


      23	

    Nagase 1999: 7- 28
      24	

      The sentence often appears in this collection. Sekiguchi Tatsumi, in-
stead, is the side character that sides in the various narrations as a sort of Watson for
Sherlock Holmes.
      25	

    See Jung 2010


                                                                                          7
Diego Cucinelli, Kyōgoku Natsuhiko, a rhetoric beyond the second degree



          “Look at me, Harasawa. I was one of those people who thought the
       war was right. When I heard the Emperor give his speech on the radio, I
       didn't know what to think. But now that I've had time to cool off, I
       understand that we were a little crazy back then. And I think that the
       democratic thing we're doing now is the right way. So maybe justice isn't
       anything more than a ghost of an idea” (Kyōgoku 2009: 388-389)	


      From the dialogues pronounced by the characters we detect a world of
disappointment. These are “ghosts” who look for “ghosts” in the vain attempt
of exorcising their own fears about the future. Still puzzled about the country’s
conditions following the American troops’ retreat, Kyōgoku’s Tokyo citizens
fall victim to a disease that consumes them from within and which is called
“uncertainty”, until the person who is in charge of both ancient Japanese
wisdom and Western Science comes to free them from such a psychological
domination. 	


       3. Rhetoric of Supernatural: the “ghostly parturient”	

      As far as the image of women in yōkai is concerned, narrations and
iconography often touch upon ideas such as descent, pregnancy, maternity and
sexuality. On top of representing some transformations often undergone by the
female body, there are also clear references to psychological processes and
social hierarchy, to women’s power to generate life and to the “impure” nature
of menstrual blood. The female dwellers of streams and bridges – the hime
(young girls) -, for example, are often associated to the idea of “virginity” as
they are known for protecting their territories against men’s passage. Others,
such as the futakuchi onna (“slit-mouthed woman”) and the rokurokubi
(“spiral neck”), instead are granted with a strong erotic component, which is
expressed through their physical characteristics: in the case of the first woman,
we notice a further mouth on the top of the head- a reference to the sexual
organ- the second woman uses her long and sinuous neck to peek at men from
behind screens or small windows in public toilets26.	





       26	

     Takemura 2006; Foster 2007


8
                                                   Between, vol. IV, n. 7 (Maggio/May 2014)



      We then have the ubume (産⼥女)27, the “ghostly parturient”, the creature
at the centre of The summer of ubume – Kyōgoku’s best known work both
nationally and internationally28. Here the conveyed image is clear and, as the
author himself often points out by quoting old works, it corresponds to the
ideas of “pregnancy” and “maternity”.	


        … occurring when a woman dies with a child unborn in her womb,
     and the body is then discarded improperly. Should the child not perish,
     but emerge in the wild, than the soul of the mother will take form, and
     clutching her babe to her walks at night. The crying of the babe is called
     the birth-wail. The ubume appears weak and drenched from the waist
     down in blood... (ibid., 6)	


     !
     Moreover:	


        Of all tales told, that of ubume is the most confounding. It is said that,
     when a woman who is with child passes away, her attachment to the babe
     takes physical form. She appears then as an apparition, drenched in blood
     from the waistdown, and crying like a bird, saying “obareee, obareee”.
     (ibid.)29	


     The passages included in the translation belong to the Kiizodanshū
(Collection of Miraculous Tales, 1687) and to the Hyaku Monogatari Hyōban
(Report of One-hundred Stories, 1686). These two works are particularly
emblematic of pre-modern fantasy genre, in which an important number of
superstitions and representations of creatures converge: the numerous




     27	

     There exist different superstitions, but the common approach would
be to describe it as the ghost of a woman who has died while giving birth to her
child. Mizuki and Murakami 2005: 47
     28	

     There is an English version of this novel. Other translated works in-
clude Rū Garū (Loups Garous, 2001) and the manga of the novel Mōryō no Hako
(Box of Goblins, 1995). Kyōgoku 2009 and 2010
     29	

    Obareee, together with urameshiya, is the commonest sound pro-
duced by Japanese ghosts.


                                                                                         9
Diego Cucinelli, Kyōgoku Natsuhiko, a rhetoric beyond the second degree



references made in the first two pages of the book30, represent a diachronic
path, in other words, milestones placed by Kyōgoku in order to allow the
reader to get familiar with the cultural background behind the novel’s yōkai.
At the end of this journey across pre-modern Japan, the reader is then
transported to the reality of 1952 Tokyo, and thus experiences the same
sensation of displacement and cognitive dissonance felt by the characters. 	

      In the indigenous folklore, the ubume is a woman who has died before
being able to give birth, and that has then been buried while still carrying her
baby in her womb. Torn by pain and regret, after her death the young lady’s
spirit becomes a yōkai destined to wander in the world of humans. She is
usually portrayed with her body covered in blood while she holds her infant
tightly to her breast. According to superstition, she usually manifests herself to
male passers-by near some crossroads or a bridge, at sunset (tasogare 黄昏)31,
and asks them to save, or more simply, to hold her child. The latter seems to
possess particular powers: according to the situation, he can make huge
fortunes appear or disproportionately increase his weight so as to become an
unsustainable burden for the unlucky man who has accepted the ubume’s
request. In other cases, he may even end up killing him32. The version of the
Kiizōdanshū, in which the infant bothers the unlucky man, sees the
intervention of Buddha Amida who comes to calm the woman and child’s
unsettled souls33.	

      	

 The choice of associating, in the title of this work, the idea of
“summer” (natsu) to this yōkai takes on an extremely symbolical meaning. As
the ethnographer Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962) pointed out, in Japanese culture
summer corresponds to the “ghosts season”, in connection to the day of the


        30	

 On top of the two already mentioned works, Kyōgoku introduces pas-
sages taken from the Honzōkōmoku (Compendium of Medicine, 1578) and from
Nanashichigusa (77493, end of 18th cent.).
        31	

   As Andō underlines in the volume Tasogare no Kuni (The Land of
Twilight, 2010), it is believed that ghostly appearances take place at sunset, when the
distinction between “light” and “darkness” is less clear. Andō 2010: 13-27
        32	

    Mizuki and Murakami 2005: 46-47
        33	

 According to the Buddhist tradition, a woman who dies without expe-
riencing pregnancy would end up in the “hell for women unable to bear children”,
while women who die during childbirth will populate the “pond of blood hell”. See
Stone and Namba 2008


10
                                                    Between, vol. IV, n. 7 (Maggio/May 2014)



dead, Obon34, in the month of August. The ubume of indigenous legends is in
fact classified in yōkaigaku as yūrei (ghost), whose season corresponds exactly
to the hottest period of the year. This setting has also been chosen by Kyōgoku
for most of the stories told in the main plot of his work. In a nutshell, the novel
describes how some ghosts sneak into a group of characters just in the period
of the year in which they manifest most strongly. These spirits bring disarray
in the group through appearances that follow the unsettled rhythm of
possessions. 	

      The Summer of the Ubume reveals a typically feminine psychological
drama. A hospital located in the deep wood and managed by a family of
doctors who have been practicing medicine since feudal times, is the centre of
strange events. Kids are born with malformations, a man disappears, a woman
carries her baby in her womb for over twenty months, infants mysteriously
disappear from the maternity ward. The basic plot is focused on the ménage “a
quatre” of two couples of lovers who are torn by external influences and
strange coincidences. In contrast with this structure that plays around the
concept of the “double”, we have the yōkai dichotomy based on the
characteristics of the “ghostly parturient” and its counterpart in the Chinese
imaginary, the kokakuchō (lit. “bird-woman predator” 姑獲⿃鳥)35, which is also
present in the story. The latter is a woman who uses the powers of a feathered
rope to kidnap children and bring them up as if they were her own. In order to
describe this myth Kyōgoku recurs to an ancient Chinese text of an
encyclopaedic nature, Honzōkōmoku (Compendium of Medicine, 1578)36.	



      34	

      In Yanagita’s works we find the expression yūrei no kisetsu (“ghosts‘
season”) referred to the hottest months of the year: in the traditional view, the after
world is placed near the world of the living and dead people’s souls come back to
visit their families during Obon. See Yanagita 2007
      35	

      The prototype brought by the Chinese iconography that consists in a
hybrid creature half woman half bird whose name is composed of three characters:
the first defines a higher class woman or an older lady, depending on the situation it
may be interpreted as “mother-in-law”. The second represents the idea of “predator”,
while the third is a “bird”, with reference to the characteristics that are partly similar
to a bird. The same creature appears also as “celestial girl” and “night girl”. See Ko-
matsu 2009 and 2010
      36	

     Ascribed to Li Shizen (1518-1593) it is the text from which develops
the hakubutsugaku, “cataloguing science”, spread in Japan among the neo-Confucian
elite in the Tokugawa period. Komatsu 2007: 5-30


                                                                                         11
Diego Cucinelli, Kyōgoku Natsuhiko, a rhetoric beyond the second degree



           Being a type of demon, often possessed of human soul, frequently
        seen in Jingzhou in Hubei. When the ubume wears feathers it becomes a
        winged bird, and when the feathers are removed, it becomes a woman.
        When a woman who is with child dies, she becomes an ubume. Thus, the
        ubume has two breasts upon its chest, and wants nothing more than to
        steal the child of living woman and make it her own. Therefore, houses
        with infants should never hang their clothes outside at night, for the bird
        will come and mark them with a drop of blood. The infant will then be
        visited by fright convulsions and disease, these being called maladies of
        misfortune. It should be noted that these birds are, without exception,
        female. They come at night in the late summer to bewilder men.
        (Kyōgoku 2009: 6)	


     While writing his work, Kyōgoku is aware of the existing dichotomy
between the Chinese and the indigenous myth, and, through Chūzenji’s words
he presents new issues on the subject: 	


           The Chinese kokakucho are said to steal away girl infants and raise
        them as their own, which is the complete opposite of how the ubume
        behaves, yes? That, and you usually write ubume with the characters for
        “giving birth” and “woman”. (ibid., 40)	


      We are faced with a yōkai which has a triple symbolic value, each one of
which represents the main characteristics that in the East Asian region are
given to the creature. The ubume’s origins are traced back to China. However,
once imported in Japan, the latter finds a substantially independent
development. Chūzenji himself informs the reader about the different aspects
of the myth:	


           To a man’s eyes, the “ghostly parturient” appears as a woman; a
        woman, instead, sees in her the image of an infant, finally, if she has to
        be considered by the sound she makes, she could be seen as a bird. All
        these different views correspond to the same subject. (ibid., 50) 	


     Reading on, we then notice how such perplexities become more
manifest: 	


           But why would someone mix up the kokakucho and the ubume?
        Stealing a child and giving a child away are completely opposite things.
        (ibid., 41)	




12
                                               Between, vol. IV, n. 7 (Maggio/May 2014)



      Based on ideas that are strongly opposed to each other, the two creatures
well reflect the images of “biological mother” and “psychological mother”
suggested by the anthropologist Kawai in a piece written on “maternity” in the
yōkai yamanba, the “old lady from the mountains”37. The first is a direct
image of the maternal instinct of protecting the child and continuing the
species, as she herself will keep on living in the following generation. The
other, the “psychological mother”, arbitrarily imposes herself as the mother of
a child with whom she does not have any biological connections38. The ubume
is the symbol of a life that has been interrupted at its very beginning, a
horrifying oxymoron between life and death, from which it is impossible to
escape. On the contrary, the “bird-woman” desperately tries to change the
course of her life by following an illusion. Starting from the title, Kyōgoku,
tracing Sekien’s footsteps, places alongside the Chinese characters kokakuchō
the interpretation in hiragana ubume, thus recreating the ambiguity
concerning the palimpsest of the two superstitions. Therefore, if his
predecessor reaffirms the fusion between the two creatures by carving the
ubume‘s hair so as to bring back to mind the wings of the bird-woman,
Kyōgoku instead chooses a double possession in which two women belonging
to the same family– the sisters Kyōko and Ryōko – re-live the myths of the
“ghostly parturient” and of the kokakuchō.	

      Both in love with the same man, Makio, the two girls live the drama that
he and their mother Kikuno are suffering: on the one hand, we have Ryōko,
who gives birth to a child conceived in rape, who is in turn killed by his
grandmother in order to hide the incestuous event to the world. Following
these tragic events, the young woman develops multiple personalities, one of
which, the angry ubume, kills Kikuno e Makio, while the other re-lives the
myth of the bird-woman and kidnaps children from the maternity ward of the
family clinic. On the other hand, Kyōko, whose marriage with Makio is in
crisis, decides to hide her problems by unconsciously staging a pregnancy that
lasts over twenty months, thus embodying the other side of the ubume, which
is the idea of “gestation”. The woman aspires to a happy marriage and sex life,
made impossible by her husband’s continual refusals. Her relationship with
Makio drives her crazy to the point of stabbing him. It is, however, the sister



     37	

    Kawai 2007: 41-60
     38	

    See Wakita 2006; Glassman 2001


                                                                                    13
Diego Cucinelli, Kyōgoku Natsuhiko, a rhetoric beyond the second degree



who commits the crime, thus sealing the sisterhood that is the framework of
their relationship39. 	

       The myth of the ubume consists in the spirit of a woman who has come
back from the world of the dead – in this specific case from the “blood
pond” (chi no ike) - in order to place the child in the safe hands of someone
who may look after him on her behalf. The relationship with blood (chi), that
emerges in the passage «the woman is covered in blood from her waist down»
taken from the Hyaku Monogatari Hyōban, is one of the yōkai‘s distinctive
traits, and in some diegetic segments Kyōgoku highlights this detail: 	


           Her hair had come loose. Her face was pale and expressionless. The
        veins rose on her forehead. Her white blouse, soaked with the rain, clung
        to her. I could clearly see the lines of her body. She was red with blood
        from the waist down. She was beautiful. She was not of this world. She
        was the ubume. (Kyōgoku 2009: 310)	


      It is in passages such as this, concerning the ubume’s appearance, that
Kyōgoku‘s stylistic choices are best understood: compared to the brief
utterance of the Hyaku Monogatari Hyōban, the text that should be its direct
expansion seems greatly influenced by the iconography concerning the ubume.
In particular, the image that takes shape through the words of the author seems
similar to the “ghostly parturient” portrayed in the Hyakkai zukan (The
Illustrated Volume of a Hundred Demons, 1737) by Sawaki Sūshi (1707-1772)
and in the Bakemonozukushi (List of Monstrous Creatures, early 18th century).
Both works emphasise the lower part of the girl’s body through shades of deep
red and the drapery of the material that partly hides her. In actual fact, the
description provided by the witness of the appearance gives the impression of
being the result of calm and ecstatic contemplation of a painting made of
perturbing lines, rather than a reaction to the sudden appearance of a ghost. 	

      The style adopted by Kyōgoku is based on brief and precise utterances
by Chūzenji to describe the yōkai’s various states, and draws liberally from the
tradition of the hyaku monogatari (“one hundred stories” 百物語), a custom
emerged in the Edo period as a form of “séance” in which groups of people
gathered in a room to tell stories about ghosts. The dark atmosphere in which
these stories are told, the bookshop specialised in old texts on Asian religions
managed by Chūzenji, reminds of the dark rooms in which – at lantern light –


        39	

     Nagase 1999: 49-72


14
                                                            Between, vol. IV, n. 7 (Maggio/May 2014)



the hyaku monogatari meetings took place. Similarly to the final appearance
of a supernatural creature in the tradition of “one hundred stories”40, Kyōgoku
structures the fatal meeting among Chūzenji, Sekiguchi – the side character –
and Ryōko, whose umpteenth overlapping personality this time combines the
Chinese bird-woman and the Japanese ubume. Again, the author develops a
text by taking inspiration from an iconographic product- this time we are
referring to a painting by the famous Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849)
inspired to the story about the “ghostly parturient” and Urabe Suetake
(950?-1022?)41 found in the Konjaku Monogatarishū (Anthology of Tales from
the Past, late 12th century)42. The author redevelops the “triangle” of
personalities on which the superstition is founded, a woman, a man and an
infant:	


       The police officers had come up the stairs behind me. They held back,
     and Kiba and Kyōgokudō ran out ahead of them.	


        “Sekiguchi! It's Ryōko! Don't be scared! It's just Ryōko standing
     there, holding a baby. You have to take the baby from her. Only you can
     do this!”	


             Of course. Because I gave her the letter.	



     40	

     According to superstition, once the last light has been extinguished, a
supernatural creature manifests itself. See Foster 2009; Figal 1999
     41	

     Urabe Suetake is a famous leader under Minamoto no Yorimitsu: his
endeavours with the “supernatural” are celebrated in a huge number of sources. Ad-
diss 2001: 56-60
     42	

       It is the most famous among the collections of Buddhist anecdotes
(setsuwa) written in Japan. According to it, the leader finds himself with his com-
rades near the gravel bed of a river which they discover being home to a ubume and
her infant killer: untouched by such superstitions, Urabe Suetake pushes his luck and
crosses the river. As he is half way in his endeavour, he hears the voice of a woman
and the wailing of an infant: a female figure manifests itself beside him, begging him
to take the child to a safe place. Urabe welcomes him in his arms, but after each step
the burden gets heavier and heavier: his great persistence prevents him from giving
up. However, as he is about to accomplish his goal, the woman asks for her child
back. Urabe ignores her and takes the child to the campsite, as he wants to show him
to his comrades. However, wrapped inside the bundle he finds only a bunch of wet
leaves. Ikegami 1993: 189-205


                                                                                                 15
Diego Cucinelli, Kyōgoku Natsuhiko, a rhetoric beyond the second degree



          I took a step forward. Ryōko took a step back. Then another. If she
        went any further-----. “Give me the child”	


          “… mother”(ibid., 310-311)	


      In the narration of the Konjaku Monogatarishū, the legendary leader
Urabe Suetake is the elected man who has been called upon to undo a curse
that is apparently impossible to extinguish. The man breaks the physical link
mother/son by revealing the inconsistent nature of the latter. Similarly,
Sekiguchi ends up being essential to the exorcism practiced by Chūzenji on
Ryōko. As the author graphically underlines (he actually draws a line under
the passage), Sekiguchi – with whom Ryōko has a strong empathic
connection- is similar to Suetake as he is destined to snatch the child from the
bird-woman’s arms. In the man’s conclusive remarks are all the various
aspects of the supernatural figure: the word kāsan (“mum”) that he pronounces
is in fact used both by children to call their mothers and by husbands to
address their wives, thus granting her the role of parent and central female
figure of the family. The reported passage, therefore, on the one hand seals the
husband/wife relationship that should have taken shape between Sekiguchi
and Ryōko – once lovers –, on the other hand, it alludes to the existence of a
son born out of this union and who, in the woman’s mind, corresponds to the
child who has been kidnapped and held.	

      In front of an audience – the transfiguration of Yorimitsu’s bodyguards,
which appear in the hypo text – the contemporary leader accomplishes his
mission in a succession of highly emotional moments in which violent
distortions of perception follow one another. As far as she is concerned, the
woman, after being deprived of even the last aspect of her bird woman’s
personality, spreads her wings into the void. Her life ends like this, in the last
attempt to free herself, which, instead, leads her to meet the same destiny she
had imposed onto her mother, meaning a violent and brutal death.	





16
                                             Between, vol. IV, n. 7 (Maggio/May 2014)



                              Bibliography	

Addiss, Stephen (2001), Japanese Ghosts and Demons: Art of the Supernatur-
     al. London: Braziller.	

Andō, Reiji (2010). Tasogare no Kuni. Tokyo: Chikuma.	

Ceci, Cristiana, ed. (1995). Racconti Fantastici. Venezia: Marsilio.	

Cornu, Philippe (2003). Dizionario del Buddhismo. Milano: Mondadori.	

Eco, Umberto (2000). Sei Passeggiate nei Boschi Narrativi. Milano: Bom-
     piani.	

Foster, M. Dylan (2007). “The Question of Slit-Mouthed Woman: Contempo-
     rary Legend, the Beauty Industry, and Women's Weekly Magazines in
     Japan”, in Signs, vol. 32, n. 3, pp. 699-726.	

Gènette, Gerard (1997). Palinsesti - la Letteratura al Secondo Grado. Torino:
     Einaudi.	

Glassman, Hank (2001). The Religious Construction of Motherhood in Me-
     dieval Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press.	

Higashi, Masao, ed. (2002). Akutagawa Ryūnosuke Yōkai Bungakukan. Tokyo:
     Gakushū Kenkyūsha.	

― , ed. (2009). Kaiki: Uncanny Tales from Japan – vol. 1. Fukuoka: Kuroda-
  --

     han Press.	

Ikegami, Shun'ichi (1993). Konjaku Monogatarishū. Tokyo: Iwanami.	

Kawai, Hayao (2007). La Casa dell'Usignolo – il Femminile Psicologico tra
     Oriente e Occidente. Bergamo: Moretti&Vitali.	

Keene, Donald (1998). Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern
     Era. New York: Columbia University Press.	

Komatsu, Kazuhiko (2007). Yōkai Nyūmon. Tokyo: Serika Shobō.	

Kondō, Mizuki (2012). “Sekien Yōkaiga Shichū”, in The Journal of Social
     Sciences and Humanities, n. 462, pp. 79-93.	

Kyōgoku, Natsuhiko (2009). The Summer of the Ubume. New York: Vertical.	

Mizuki Shigeru and Murakami Kenji (2005), Nihon Yōkai Daijiten, Tokyo:
     Kadokawa Shoten.	

Napier, Susan (1996). The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature: the Sub-
     version of Modernity. Londra: Routledge.	

Saxonhouse, Gary (2004). Japan's Lost Decade: Origins, Consequences and
     Prospects for Recovery. London: Wiley-Blackwell.	

Schaller, Michael (1987). The American Occupation of Japan – the Origins of
     the Cold War. Oxford: Oxford University Press.	





                                                                                  17
Diego Cucinelli, Kyōgoku Natsuhiko, a rhetoric beyond the second degree



Stone Jacqueline and Namba Mariko (2008). Death and the Afterlife in Ja-
    panese Buddhism. London: Stone.	

Takemura, Mariko (2006). Rokurokubi no Kubi wa Naze Nobiru no ka –
    Asobu Seibutsugaku e no Shōtai. Tokyo: Shinchōsha.	

Todorov, Tzvetan (2000). La letteratura fantastica. Milano: Garzanti.	

Wakita, Haruko (2006). Women in Medieval Japan: Motherhood, Household
    Management and Sexuality. London: Monash Asia Institute.	

Yanagita Kunio (2007), Yōkaidangi. Tokyo: Kōdansha Bunko.	




                                         L'autore	

Diego Cucinelli 	

            !
       He got in 2013 a PhD in Japanese Literature at Sapienza University.
From 2005 to 2007 he is visiting scholar at Waseda University (Tokyo) and in
2009, in the same university, got an MA in Contemporary Literature. His
research interests deal with Japanese Modern and Contemporary Literature
and Japanese demonology. At present he is Adjunct of Japanese Language and
Culture at Università degli Studi della Tuscia.	

            !
            Email: diego.cucinelli@gmail.com	




                                        L'articolo	

Data invio: 16/02/2014	

Data accettazione: 30/04/2014	

Data pubblicazione: 30/05/2014	




                          Come citare questo articolo	

Cucinelli, Diego, “Kyōgoku Natsuhiko, a rhetoric beyond the second degree”,
Between, IV.7 (2014), http://www.between-journal.it/	

        !

18
