Asian Horror Encyclopedia: Asian Horror Culture in Literature, Manga, and Folklore

All Rights Reserved © 2001 by Laurence C. Bush

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

Writers Club Press

an imprint of iUniverse.com, Inc.

For information address:

iUniverse.com, Inc.

5220 S 16th, Ste. 200

Lincoln, NE 68512

www.iuniverse.com

ISBN: 0-595-20181-4

ISBN: 978-1-4697-1503-2 (eBook)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

INTRODUCTION

EDITORIAL METHOD

CHRONOLOGY

Asian Horror Encyclopedia

ASIAN HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA: A

ASIAN HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA: B

ASIAN HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA: C

ASIAN HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA: D

ASIAN HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA: E

ASIAN HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA: F

ASIAN HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA: G

ASIAN HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA: H

ASIAN HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA: I

ASIAN HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA: J

ASIAN HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA: K

ASIAN HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA: L

ASIAN HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA: M

ASIAN HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA: N

ASIAN HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA: O

ASIAN HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA: P

ASIAN HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA: Q

ASIAN HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA: R

ASIAN HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA: S

ASIAN HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA: T

ASIAN HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA: U

ASIAN HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA: V

ASIAN HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA: W

ASIAN HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA: X

ASIAN HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA: Y

ASIAN HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA: Z

SELECTED INTERNET REFERENCES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

The present work traces the major outlines of supernatural horror literature in Japan and China. Their occult traditions are old and rich, ranging from ancient folklore to ultra-modern media. In our ethnocentric culture, little has been written about horror outside the English language, let alone the exotic Far East. Originally I had proposed to write exclusively about Japanese horror, but the roots of Japanese terror were difficult to unravel with such a narrow approach. One cannot write about the Japanese without writing about China, and even Korea, as well. Adding those two countries brings the rest of the Far East with them, and so the book was formed.

I. Barriers and Intimations

The study of Asian horror has enormous obstacles. Obviously, the language barrier is a major block. The available translated literature is small, trying, misleading and often frustrating. References to common themes such as ghosts, devils or even Godzilla are often not related to horror or the supernatural. Then there is the problem of galloping didacticism. Instead of invoking horror, Asian weird literature often teaches the reader not to fear the supernatural or how to deal with it. This tendency to defuse horror casts doubt upon its universality. Finally, academic snobbery avoids works with the slightest scent of popular culture, unless sanitized by age or historical significance.

Language is an essential part of culture. The gap between the Asian and European languages makes a difficult passage across cultural boundaries. Often the more interesting books are the most difficult to translate, such as Yumeno Kyusaku’s Dogura Magura (Sorceries, 1935) which requires a furigana gloss as a help even for Japanese readers.

The frightening images of one culture may or may not carry over to another. One historical commonality is the Christian and Buddhist depiction of Hell. Hideous torments of the damned from religious sources spawn more terror than piety and more fascination with the horrid than the numinous. The Buddhist Hell inspired Akutagawa’s The Spider’s Thread and undoubtedly other stories.

The presence of horror in Chinese folklore, Hong Kong films, and Japanese comics is easily seen from the West, but not so for horror in Asian literature. Often critical works invoke the supernatural in a title or phrase but contain no horror content. For example, Robert C. Solomon’s article, The Philosophy of Horror, or Why Did Godzilla Cross the Road does not even mention Godzilla or anything Asian, except a passing reference to monsters. In fact, Godzilla can scarcely be tied to horror. While he fits the pattern of the unclean mutant and giant, he is more loved than feared.

The major exceptions to this literary blackout are Edogawa Rampo’s Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination and Kyoka Izumi’s Japanese Gothic Tales. Edogawa’s story collection is the result of five painstaking years where Edogawa worked with the translator sentence-by-sentence to get each story as close to the Japanese original as possible. Kyoka’s collection comes from the recent revival of interest in the gothic mode of literature. His erotic imagination and razor sharp text place him well within the acceptable pattern of modern prose, despite the age of some of his stories. The same could be said for Edogawa.

Occasionally, the determined reader runs across a Japanese weird tale in unexpected sources. One such case is Nakajima Atsushi, a less well known author who had some of his stories translated into English in a small booklet. This work has a story called the Mummy. Written in the early 1940’s, it would be at home in the American pulp magazine, Weird Tales. Favorably comparable to one of Sax Rohmer’s Tales of Secret Egypt, it has an admirable amount of historical detail as well as a fine sense of psychological horror.

The Asian didactic attitude that the supernatural is not to be feared but faced courageously gave rise to an anti-horror literature. Chinese traditional ghost stories (see Ghosts) from the Tang Dynasty through Pu Songling’s inimitable Liaozhai, teach that ghosts can be easily fooled or waylaid with simple anti-ghost formulas, such as human saliva. Just as Western literary heroes fool the devil, Asian heroes overcome ghosts and other undesirable supernatural beings.

II. Terror and Disgust

What emerges from this kind of study is an argument for the universality of horror. H.P. Lovecraft said that fear was man’s oldest emotion and indeed fear influenced much of Asian’s ancient literature. The fear of death, decomposition of the body, movement of corpses, burial ground scavengers and the persistence of ghost stories lent a common basis for supernatural speculation. The East has its vampires, were-creatures, demons, wraiths and ghosts comparable to the West. Indeed they are all at least cousins if not siblings or twins.

According to Darwin in his seminal Expressions in Man and Animals, horror is a visceral reaction not an emotion. It rises from contemplation of a hateful or painful experience such as torture. Darwin used photographs of humans and apes to illustrate the visceral side of horror. But Darwin represents the old view of horror.

Modern horror criticism argues that horror is an emotional and aesthetic experience that goes beyond the visceral components of terror and disgust. Horror at its finest touches on what Lovecraft calls a sense of cosmic awe. Noel Carroll even connects it to the religious experiences described in Rudolf Otto’s classic theological work, The Idea of the Holy, which talks about the tremendous awe and fear man feels in the raw presence of the divine.

On the lower end of horror, the component of sadism is explored with unusual thoroughness in Asian horror. Perhaps the same can be said of the mystical side of horror. The unabashed cruelty of Asian horror gave rise to Western works, such as Octave Mirbeau’s wrenching Les Jardins aux supplice (The Torture Garden), that far exceed any traditional Asian work for sheer shock value.

The long history of horror culture helps to make a complete picture of man and his fantastic fears, and no such history is complete without the Asian side of the story. Horror is nearly unique in its exclusive aim of evoking specific reactions in the perceiver. It is fear mingled with disgust, the repulsion of the unclean and the otherworldly. Arthur Machen saw horror as a violation of the laws of nature and used the example of flowers, a natural entity, singing a weird song, to explain that horror is an intrusion on the natural world. It is man’s imagination capturing strange images in the dark.

The present work attempts to capture hitherto unnoticed horror culture from Japan and China. Its emphasis is on horror and horror-related literature largely unknown in the English speaking world. It also covers the mythological roots of horror and some superficial discussion of the meta-physics or philosophy behind it. Information from diverse sources is gathered together for the first time, since no one seems to have written about Asian horror culture as a whole, at least not in the English language.

The emphasis here is on the written word, since that is the least accessible and consequently least known aspect of the field. More visibly, Japanese comics, or manga as they are called, have always featured horror as a popular genre, though often with a different approach than traditional horror. Asian horror films and animation have been well covered in other sources, and the only ones mentioned here have a literary connection or have not been recognized specifically as horror media. Horror manga, however, has not received sufficient attention in English language references so it is included here in detail.

III. History of the Strange

With its connections to the most ancient folklore, superstition and religious beliefs, horror literature has the deepest roots and is the most revealing side of the human spirit. It is composed of a slew of components, fear, disgust, the unknown, eroticism, taboo, sadism, the unclean, the unholy, and the unearthly. It touches upon the imagination in ways that no other literature can.

The earliest Chinese ghost stories come from the marvel tales dating from the 1st century AD up to the beginning of the Tang Dynasty. These are usually collections of strange stories from diverse sources, retold by a single author to give them consistency and more credibility. Typical titles of such collections are Records of Spirits, Accounts of the Immortals, or Records of Strange Things. Often the collections are attributed to noted authors of the time, but generally authorship and origins are very doubtful. Story collections are often incomplete with large collections sometimes only having a few tales extant today.

The massive stream of Chinese folklore spawned the golden age of fantastic stories in the Tang Dynasty (~600-900 AD). These stories were usually presented boldly as utter truth with little effort towards the Coleridgian willing suspension of disbelief. They represent a fascination with wraiths, mirrors and doppelgangers as well as the usual ghosts and supernatural creatures.

While Gothic literature reared its hideous head over Europe, the Chinese scholar Pu Songling started on the Liaozhai, or Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio as the translator, Herbert Giles, called it. It is a huge collection of over 400 stories that cover the whole range of Chinese weird tales up to his time. Among the Chinese scholars, Giles stands apart for his painstaking translation of this rather unorthodox work. This collection of largely supernatural tales by the great Pu Songling is a rich source of ghostly lore, religious belief and Chinese mythology. Pu Songling called himself the Historian of the Strange and his work has been an endless source for horror comics, film and literature to this day.

The year after Pu Songling died, Yuan Mei was born. Originally pursuing a career as a civil servant and magistrate, he dropped out to follow his literary passions. This included ghost stories. He eventually published the weird story collection, What the Master Would Not Discuss. The master he referred to was Confucius, who refused to speak about marvels and ghost stories. This collection recently became available in English translation. The great translator and interpreter of the Orient, Arthur Waley wrote a biography of Yuan Mei, with much obvious admiration even for Yuan Mei’s supernatural work.

After Yuan Mei, Chinese supernatural literature seems to descend into a rut of imitations and rehashing. Little was added to the genre, and Western influence so obvious in Japan seems lacking in China. Jules Verne’s works were translated into Chinese over a century ago and were received with great enthusiasm, but not Edgar Allan Poe.

As genre fiction, science fiction has the edge in mainland China because it has a didactic purpose. It encourages young people to study science. The other genres, including horror, have largely been dropped as useless, unless some historical significance justifies their existence. In one case, a Tang Dynasty ghost story appears in an official People’s Republic of China anthology called Women in Chinese Folklore, as representative, not of the supernatural, but of the strength of Chinese women. With the important exception of Damien Sin, a Singaporean writing in English, no modern horror from the Chinese realm is visible in the West. To see modern Asian horror literature, the reader must look to Japan.

Japan too had an early gothic period. In 1768, Ueda Akinari published his celebrated collection Ugetsu Monogatari (Tales of Moonlight and Rain), which contained many seminal ghost stories still influential today. His works still appear in all media from comics to film. Santo Kyoden and his more famous student, Bakin followed in Ueda’s footsteps as exponents of the supernatural in literature.

Inspired by Percival Lowell’s The Soul of the Far East to move to Japan, Lafcadio Hearn became the Western pioneer of Asian supernatural stories. He retold classical Chinese and Japanese stories in modern language, taking great pains to retain their original awe and terror. One of his books of Japanese ghost stories, Kwaidan, was the inspiration for a Japanese movie and more recently a puppet drama, currently touring the United States. Originally written in English, his books have been translated into Japanese, and he is celebrated by Japanese and English-speaking scholars alike. His achievement is unique in the field of Japanese horror culture.

Though Poe had little impact on Chinese literature, he had enormous influence on Meiji writers such as Tanizaki and Akutagawa. Poe’s fascination with the psychology of horror also captivated the succeeding generations of Japanese writers. Mystery writer Edogawa Rampo named himself after Poe and titled his English story collection after one of Poe’s books. In the modern era, Abe Kobo and Sato Haruo both cited Poe as a significant influence on their work.

With Poe began the Western onslaught. Strangely enough, according to Kotani Mari in her article on Japanese vampires in Blood Read, the vampire did not appear in Japanese literature until the late 1930’s shortly after the translation of Dracula. Even then, the vampire was a metaphor of the invasion of Western culture into Japan. According to such experts as Montague Summers and Bernhardt Hurwood, the vampire myth is universal, though apparently no one told the Japanese.

As if to compensate for the lack of vampires, the Japanese have been seriously studying ghosts for a long time. They call the field yokaigaku, or the study of ghosts. Starting with the scholar Toriyama Sekien, who tried to make a catalog of ghosts, the supernatural has long been the subject of serious thought in Japan. It finally reached academic recognition with Toyo University professor, Inoue Enryo, who made a six volume study of ghostly phenomena. Still controversial, the academic study of ghosts gave credibility to the subject. In the 1999, the Fulbright Program granted a fellowship in yokaigaku to a Stanford student. In recent years, Abe Kazuo and Professor Komatsu Kazuhiko published many books and articles on yokaigaku, demonology and related topics.

This long ghostly tradition provided material for an endless stream of Japanese horror comics, or horror manga. The long, intricate history of horror manga needs a book length study to do it justice. A large percentage of manga artists did at least one horror title during their careers, starting with the early pioneers to the manga gods: Tezuka Osamu, Fujiko Fujio, Go Nagai and Mizuki Shigeru, to name a very few. With the horror boom hitting Japan in the mid 1990’s, there seems to be no end to the onslaught of horror in this format.

Least known in the West is modern Japanese horror literature. While wildly famous throughout Asia, Suzuki Koji, sometimes called Stephen

King of Japan, is scarcely a household word in the West. His books have been adapted to comics, film, television and video games, but except for an interview with film director Nakata Hideo in Fangoria, the whole phenomena has been ignored in the West.

On the other hand, the Japanese are intimately familiar with Western horror literature. Like Poe, H.P. Lovecraft has a respectable following in Japan, and his work inspired a major series of Cthulhu mythos novels, stories and manga. The mythos is a cycle of loosely connected tales about Lovecraft’s Elder Gods and mysterious entities lurking on the fringes of the world, waiting to reclaim it from an unsuspecting mankind.

Sadly, Westerners only sees their segment of the horror culture. The limited market for translated Asian literature mostly restricts it to mainstream or classical literature. Horror is difficult to translate because of cultural differences, though the visual arts are attracting attention to Japanese genre fiction. Kikuchi Hideyuki’s books are not yet available in English but the animated versions of Vampire Hunter D, Wicked City and Demon City Shinjuku are well known. Sena Hideaki’s horror novel, Parasite Eve, is known by its Sony Playstation game version. The list will continue to grow in the coming decades.

Even less known in the West, the Koreans have many fine examples of supernatural literature. The classical novel, Chongun hongnyon chon, is a tale of the ghostly revenge of two grievously wronged sisters. It is believed that Ueda used Korean sources for some of the tales in Ugetsu Monogatari. Hampered by didacticism and conservatism, Korea produced some fine supernatural fiction in its classical period and has at least one noted horror novelist today. Lee Woo-hyuk’s online horror novel made such a sensation, it was eventually filmed as The Soul Guardian. Again, it is mainly through visual arts that the outsiders have a clear view of Asian horror Probably the best source of Korean supernatural lore in English is Im Bang’s collection of Korean folktales.

The saddest fact is the lack of awareness of Asian horror literature in the West, especially when compared to the vast Asian knowledge of our literature. The universality of the Internet and the rising interest in Japanese popular culture will change that within the next century. Like an individual, a culture cannot be fully self-aware until it confronts and partially assimilates its shadow.

IV. Horror Art

Horror permeates all forms of artistic expression. It is present in oral tradition, ancient literature, sagas, folktales, fairy tales, short stories, histories, novels, poetry, art, music, comic strips, puppets, and film. Frequently horror is a component of other genres, especially detective fiction, murder mysteries and science fiction. While the Chinese recognized the power of representational art in the literary theme of magic painting (see Paintings, Magical), supernatural culture reached a high water mark in Japanese visual arts.

Many of Japan’s finest artists portrayed ghosts and demons in their work. Toriyama, Hiroshige, Hokusai, Yoshitoshi and Utagawa all made extensive studies of the spirit world and Japanese horror lore. Grotesque and striking, this work is unique and haunting.

Continuing this tradition, Japanese comic artists draw from the fine arts. A Tezuka Osamu manga might begin with a selection of creatures from Hyaki yako, or Kusonoki Kei might draw an ghostly emanation of a Kabuki mask. Hanawa Kazuichi is another manga artist inspired by traditional works from Japan’s medieval period. Manga expert, Frederik Schodt describes his work as Japanese retro-kitsch horror. (See also Art, Ero guro, Garo, Manga.)

V. Supernatural Culture

The 21st Century will see the dawn of world culture. Asia will no longer be the mysterious land of stereotypes and paranoid fantasy. Its culture is vast and widely varied, and its visual arts have only just begun to seep into Western consciousness. The language