I’m back from Kyoto’s Uzumasa film studio. It was an exhausting event, but really fun! According to the studio, it was the greatest attendance the park has seen in 20 to 30 years! This just goes to show the international appeal of yokai, and how they’ve become a major tourism force in recent years, especially during the Halloween season.
Tonight’s A-Yokai-A-Day is another story featuring poetry, and like the previous story about poetry, I have to grumble a bit about translating Japanese poems into English.
The poem in this story comes from a famous piece of Japanese literature witten over 1000 years ago: Makura sōshi. The poem describe’s a fisherman’s boat returning home:
“I see someone rowing on the sea; a fisherman returning with his catch.”
However, the monk in this story recites this story using homophones that change the meaning entirely:
“I see something I yearn for in the embers; a frog hanging in the rain.”
The poem works like a magic spell, with the power to recall the spirit back to wherever it came from. It’s a testament to the monk’s wisdom and wit that he able to find the right classical poem and extract a line from it, changing its meaning to apply to this particular situation.
It’s not an easy reference to get. There’s no way to translate it into English in a way that retains the reference, and it doesn’t make much sense without an idea of how highly regarded poetry has been throughout much of Japan’s history, that it should have such an effect on evil spirits. So I hope you can enjoy the story better with this little cultural note.
The Apparitions in Yoshida Sōtei’s House; or, The Power of Poetry
In Murakami, Echigo Province, there was a wealthy merchant named Yoshida Sōtei. Strange apparitions suddenly began appearing in his house.
On the first day, four or five cute chigo appeared in the northwest corner of his warehouse and sang an unfamiliar song for a while, then vanished. The next day, at dusk, a handsome samurai appeared with six others. They all drew swords and fought, and everyone was killed. Upon inspection, they all had turned into ashes. On the third day, a beautiful lady around 16 years old, her head covered in a light kerchief, made a showy entrance, spread her fan and performed a popular dance, and then vanished into thin air.
Sōtei was worried about this, and asked high priests and monks to perform various exorcisms and prayers for him. This perhaps had some effect, as nothing happened for four, five, or six days afterwards; but on the seventh day, when a fire was lit in the sitting room hearth, a single tree frog appeared in the fire. Everyone was startled, and they took the frog out of the fire and released it, but then another one appeared in the fire, and then another, and it never stopped. Sōtei was so distressed that he called a certain pious Zen monk and asked him for help. The monk, seeing the situation, faced the hearth and recited a single poem:
“I see something I yearn for in the embers; a frog hanging in the rain.”
The frog vanished, and nothing strange happened again. This is truly the power of waka poetry.