Lust can drive men to do appalling things, as you will see in a bit.
Today’s story of death and desire came to Japan from China, and the transition actually
changed the entire meaning of the story.
I’ll tell you how afterwards.
The story is called Botan Doro (牡丹燈籠) or The Peony Lantern.
Our tale starts long ago.
It was the Obon (お盆) festival, where people honored their ancestors by welcoming their
spirits back to Earth for a few days.
A man named Ogiwara Shinnojo (荻原新之丞) sat in front of his house, morose.
He had recently lost his wife.
As night descended on Shinnojo and his empty house, he spots a light in the distance.
It bobbed back and forth getting bigger and bigger until it became two figures.
One was a woman who held a lantern adorned with painted peony flowers.
But it was the other figure that made Shinnojo gasp.
His eyes caressed her body as his gaze moved upwards, where it came upon the most beautiful
face he had ever seen.
He stood straight up.
And then he stood up and greeted them.
The woman said her name was Otsuyu (お露) and the one holding the lantern was her servant.
Lacking better judgement because of the reduced blood flow to his brain, Shinnojo immediately
invited her in.
Her servant stayed outside of course.
She said she lived near a certain temple and that she came from a pretty influential family,
then they slept together.
She stayed with him the entire night, but had to leave early before dawn.
The next night, to Shinnojo’s surprise and delight, Otsuyu visited again, and again they
spent the night together.
Shinnojo caught feelings.
He forgot about his dead wife.
He stopped taking care of himself, he stopped leaving his house, he stopped caring about
anything really and only waited for Otsuyu’s night visits.
He was so enamored with her that he ignored the fact that she only visited at night and
always left before morning.
Shinnojo’s neighbors were not as clueless, they began to worry about his strange behavior.
One night, one of his neighbors, an old man, heard a woman’s voice from inside Shinnojo’s
house.
Being a good neighbor, he peeked inside.
Otsuyu’s servant was a terrible lookout.
The sight appalled him.
There was Shinnojo, in bed, in the arms of a woman.
But she was no regular woman.
Her skin was rotting off her bones.
Her voice sounded human, but it emerged from the mouth of a skeleton.
Shinnojo was in the throes of ecstasy with a rhythmic, decomposing corpse.
The next morning, the old neighbor confronted Shinnojo and revealed what he saw.
Shinnojo knew the neighbor was a trustworthy man and was not the sort to joke about such
things.
If the neighbor said so, then it must be true.
Otsuyu the Gorgeous was an illusion and Otsuyu the Ghost was the reality.
The old man warned Shinnojo that if he kept meeting with the ghost, it would eventually
drain the life from him and kill him.
Shinnojo remembered that Otsuyu had said that she lived near a certain temple, so he went
to investigate.
There, sure enough, he found a peony lantern lying on top of a grave.
Her grave.
Shinnojo told a Buddhist priest at the temple what happened, and the priest gave him a spirit-repelling
charm to place outside his home.
And so he did.
Otsuyu did not come that night.
Nor the next, nor the one after that.
But love is not easily forgotten, and Shinnojo became depressed and indulged himself in drink.
One drunken night, he stumbled to Otsuyu’s grave and she appeared to him, as bewitching
as he remembered.
She invited him to her home.
After a few days, the neighbors became concerned.
They searched Shinnojo’s house and looked all over town, but could not find him anywhere.
Finally someone decided to open Otsuyu’s grave, and there he was.
Naked, embracing the rotting skeleton of Otsuyu, and very much dead.
They said sometimes on dark, cloudy nights, people would see Otsuyu, the servant, and
Ogiwara Shinnojo walking together.
And the same people would fall ill afterwards.
The Ogiwara family felt guilty that the ghosts were hurting people, so they called in a Buddhist
priest.
The priest performed a ritual, releasing the three spirits from the earthly realm forever.
When a person dies, strong emotions may force her spirit to linger on Earth instead of passing
to the afterlife.
Sadly, unlike in other Japanese ghost stories, the strong emotion for Otsuyu was not anger
or vengeance, but it seemed to be extreme loneliness.
There is another version of the story where the two were originally a couple, so when
Otsuyu died, the strong emotion that kept her spirit on Earth was love.
This folktale was actually adapted from an old Chinese folktale.
In the original story, it wasn’t a Buddhist priest who exorcised the ghosts, it was a
Taoist priest.
He summoned guards from the underworld to capture the ghosts, flog them, and make them
write confessions of their crimes.
The priest made a long speech about how harming people was an unforgivable crime deserving
of divine punishment.
Then he sent them to the underworld for divine punishment.
The story had a clear religious and moral lesson against hurting people, and definitely
against hurting people after you died.
This whole trial and moral lesson were absent from the Japanese version.
It could be that the Japanese audience was not familiar with Taoist rituals, so including
it would have confused people.
Whatever the reason, the Japanese story lost its religious and moral message and became
a story told for mainly entertainment.
And for other stories to entertain you, check out the Japanese Folktales playlist on the
side here.
Come on, just do it.
I wanna thank the new patrons this week, Lisa Williams, Peter Williamson, and Apenguicitis,
sounds painful.
Alright you, much love and spread the knowledge.