Senzai no rei is built out of three plain pieces: senzai, the former wife — the one who was there before — and rei, a spirit.
It is worth noticing that the word is positional rather than emotional. It does not say jealous, and it does not say wronged. It identifies her only by sequence: she came first. Everything else that attaches to the figure is attached by the people telling it.
Nor is it a word for a kind of being. The spirit of a first wife is not a species like the kappa or the tengu; it is an occasion on which a known category — the resentful dead — is said to have appeared. Our note on what a yōkai is deals with how much of the modern bestiary was produced by filing occasions as species.
The useful thing about this subject in Japanese is that there is a parallel vocabulary for the living, and it is not a metaphor.
Uwanari-uchi — the striking of the second wife — names a recognised practice. When a man took a new wife, the former wife, with her female relations and friends, was in certain periods entitled to go to the new household and make a demonstration: an organised, announced, socially legible assault.
The point for this note is the second half of that. It was a form, with conventions — not a crime and not a secret. It had a name, which is how we know about it, and the name is a compound of the same word.
The antiquarian Santō Kyōden thought it worth an illustrated study in his collection of old things, which is itself evidence: by the Edo period the custom was far enough gone to be a curiosity, and recent enough to be documented.
And then it goes one step further, which is the finding that makes this category worth an article.
A Japanese dictionary of folklore records a shrine in Hōki province whose subordinate shrines held a first consort, a second consort and a third consort. At that shrine there was formerly a rite in which miko came out from the left and from the right carrying sprays of sakaki, struck at each other for a while, and then performed the kagura.
This, the dictionary says, was called the deity of uwanari-uchi. The rite is no longer performed.
Read that twice. A quarrel between a first wife and a second wife had been abstracted into three ranked consort-deities and a choreographed striking performed by shrine women, and the whole thing had a patron deity, and then it lapsed.
Which means this material has four layers and not two: a thing wives did; a convention governing how they did it; a rite that re-enacted it with the human beings removed; and a spirit said to come back and do it when she is dead and cannot.
A note on where this figure tends to be found in print, since three of the records this site has worked from recently come out of the same place.
The two-volume compendium of oral tradition published in Tokyo in 1913 gives its ninth chapter to strange occurrences and its tenth to the vengeful dead. The tenth chapter continues the same running numeration and keeps the same format throughout: numbered entries, one paragraph each, the source book named in brackets at the end. Our note on the one-wheeled cart describes how the compendium works and what its method is, so that is not repeated here.
What matters is that a whole chapter was given to this category at all. The strange occurrences chapter holds animals, lights, objects and places; the vengeful dead get their own division, numbered consecutively, with the first wife’s spirit among them.
The chapter heading is also doing classification work that the individual terms resist. Onryō names a relation — somebody resented somebody — and a chapter heading turns it into a shelf.
That editorial decision tells you the compiler thought the resentful dead were a kind of thing rather than a kind of event — which is the opposite of what the vocabulary suggests, and worth holding in mind when reading any single entry.
The first wife’s spirit is usually filed under onryō, the vengeful dead, and that is roughly right but worth being exact about.
An onryō in the classic sense is a person who was wronged, often publicly, often by someone powerful, and whose return is a matter of redress. Our notes on Sugawara no Michizane and on the head of Taira no Masakado deal with the political end of it, where the remedy is enshrinement — you give the dead a shrine and a rank and you ask them to stop.
The goryō is the same machinery applied to the high-ranking dead specifically.
The first wife does not fit either shape cleanly. Nothing was done to her in public. There is no office that wronged her, no court that can be petitioned, no honour to be restored. What she is said to want is not redress but position — the place in a household that is now occupied by somebody else.
And the asymmetry of remedy follows from that. A wronged minister can be given a shrine, because rank is the currency he was deprived of and rank can be issued. There is no instrument for issuing a wife her former place back, least of all once somebody else is standing in it.
That is a domestic claim rather than a political one, and it is why this figure belongs with the household material rather than with the great avenging ghosts. Our notes on the privy god and on the god of the well deal with the other things that were held to be already in the house.
Buddhist framing supplied the mechanism, and it did so in a way that cuts both ways.
Attachment is the standard account: she has not let go, and what has not been let go of does not depart. On that reading the returning wife is not owed anything. She is failing at something, and the proper response is not appeasement but release — a memorial service, a sutra, a severing.
The alternative framing available in the same period is karma: the arrangement itself produced the consequence, and the household is paying for what the household did. On that reading nobody is failing at anything, and the trouble is a bill.
Those two accounts place the fault in opposite places, and both were in circulation at once. One blames the dead woman for not letting go; the other blames the living for the position she was put in. Nothing in the vocabulary of senzai no rei chooses between them, because the word, as noted at the start, says only that she came first.
People set down that this had happened in a house — that something came back, and that the household understood who it was. Those records exist in some number. They are brief, they report the event and not the person, and they rarely say what anybody felt about it.
Five such records became the five stories in There Is No Column For It. The book is at /books/there-is-no-column-for-it/.
The readings in “When a Practice Becomes a Rite”, “Where the Category Boundary Falls” and “The Explanation Offered” are KWAIDANOTE’s own.
Found an error? Write to kwaidanote@gmail.com — corrections are made on this page and dated.