TATARI

Twenty-one Japanese tales of tatari — the anger that outlives a life: gods who declare a plague their own will, and dead men whose grievance a state was forced to answer.

The word is usually translated “curse,” and the translation is not wrong; it is only late. In Japan’s oldest chronicles, tatari is something a god does. A pestilence empties half the houses of a country, and the record does not look for a poisoner or a sin; it asks which god is doing this, and what that god wants.

Not all of these are ghosts. Some are gods who were never human, whose anger needs no injury to explain it. Some are political terrors that speak in the grammar of haunting because no other grammar was safe. Some are the state itself, apologising.