Kyoto, in the fourteenth or fifteenth year of Kyōhō — 1729 or 1730 — and a merchant house called Matsutooya. The record gives the house, the boy’s name, and the name of the priest who was called in. It is that specificity that drew me to the case, more than the haunting itself: this is not “once upon a time,” it is a household in a named city in a named year.
The account also turns partway through in a way ghost stories rarely do. It begins as a possession by two living spirits and becomes something sadder when one of those spirits dies while still inside the boy.
Matsunosuke, a merchant’s son of fourteen or fifteen, became the object of secret affection for two girls who lived within a few doors of the house. Their fixation grew until both souls left their living bodies and possessed the boy at once — ikiryō, living-spirit possession.
His body rose into the air and spoke in the girls’ voices. A priest of standing was called to perform the rites. During the weeks that followed, one of the two girls — her soul kept from her body too long — died, becoming a shiryō, a spirit of the dead, in the middle of the haunting. The case became a sensation.
The incident is recorded in Okinagusa, the great miscellany compiled in Kyoto by Kanzawa Tokō, in its fifty-sixth book.[1] It names the house, the boy Matsunosuke, and the priest who was called in, Zōkai Etan (1682–1733).
The boy rose from the floor. Two girls’ voices came out of his mouth at once, in jealousy and longing, and quarrelled with each other through him.
When Zōkai began his prayers, nothing whatever happened for the first several days: the two voices went on arguing over the chanting, unmoved. Then, by degrees, they began to give way. A month went by, and every night the voices came back.
Then one of the girls died. Her soul had been out of her body so long that the body had failed. As a spirit of the dead now, she asked to be allowed to change her clothes before she left, and named for her mother the robe she wanted; the record says the colour and pattern were spoken aloud, and does not write them down. The other girl, still living, went back to her own body. Both took what they were given, made their farewells, and left the boy.
The compiler closes with his own view: that human feeling can break free of the body and wander.[1]
This is not a tale handed down through generations but a contemporary report, set down by a Kyoto writer within living memory of the event and attached to a named priest.
The ikiryō has long roots in Japanese literature, the famous instance being Lady Rokujō in the eleventh-century Tale of Genji, whose living spirit attacks Genji’s pregnant wife without her ever deciding on it.[2] What sets the Matsutooya case apart, as I read it, is the transformation from living spirit to spirit of the dead in the middle of an active haunting.
The dead girl’s request to change clothes carries more weight than it appears to. The dead in Japanese tradition are dressed in particular garments for the journey ahead. That a disembodied spirit should mind this, and should name a robe for her mother, is the most human detail in the account — and the record’s refusal to write the robe down is the most tactful.
Ghosts are what remains after death. This girl appeared before hers, and then died mid-haunting — already out of her body, already acting as a spirit, not yet dead. When the body finally failed, was there a moment of realization, or had she crossed over without noticing?
And the second girl, who survived and went back: did she wake with a month missing, or did she keep the memory of those nights spent speaking through another person’s mouth?
The compiler wrote that human feeling sometimes breaks free and wanders. The harder question is not whether he was right, but what parts of us are wandering already.
The readings in “Notes on the Record” and “A Question Left Hanging” are KWAIDANOTE’s own.
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