Subject
Yūrei 幽霊
The returning dead. Not a kind of creature but one dead person in particular: the first question anyone in the room asks is which. Most return to something the living failed to do — a body never taken away, a funeral set aside, rites paid for and never said.
Notes
- A Ghost Is Someone in Particular In the old Japanese records a yūrei is not a type of spirit but one dead person, known by a flute or a hand and returning to what the living left undone.
- Three Names for the Dead Yūrei, onryō, goryō: three words the Japanese record uses for a dead person, and the difference between the last two is something the living decided.
- What Is a Yōkai? The word now translated as monster first named an event, not a creature. How yōkai, mononoke, bakemono, and ayakashi came to mean what they mean.
- The Peony Lantern Passed Hand to Hand From a Chinese collection of 1378 to a Kyoto priest in 1666 to a storyteller taken down in shorthand in 1884 — and one of them opens by naming the others.
- The Ghost in the Photograph Was the Last Customer A newspaper reported a ghost in a photograph in Aomori. The photographer explained it at once: the glass plate had not been cleaned before reuse.
Volume
Japanese Horror Folktales Collection
YUREI
Tales of the Returning Dead
Twenty-five Japanese tales of the returning dead — not a kind of creature, but one dead person in particular, come back to something still unsettled between them and the living.
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