I had a few idle days and started watching the 2023 Japanese anime Onmyoji, initially drawn by the fact that it was a Netflix production. I had heard the saying that Netflix makes only premium titles, and I was curious that the company had reached Japanese animation.
The anime runs for thirteen episodes. After the first few, I already felt it was well made: it has a main plot and subplots, each layer pushing the story forward, and the arrangement of events is controlled. Compared with the seventh season of Buliangren, the gap in storytelling feels like teacher and student. Buliangren has been part of the rise of Chinese animation, but season seven told its story badly.
When I finished Onmyoji, I felt a certain melancholy. Setting aside other things, Japan's animation production is unquestionably world-class. The art is beautiful, the food, clothing, housing, and customs carry a strong national character, and the narrative flows. Beyond that, Japanese animation often hits a theme or mood that resonates with the audience. That last point is the hardest trick.
Later I learned that the anime came from a novel of the same name. The novel must have been a strong IP first, then adapted. I became interested in the book. I thought about buying physical copies, but for various reasons I hesitated. After trying several routes, I unexpectedly found that I could read it directly in the Tomato Free Novels app on my phone. Yesterday I read the first three sections of Onmyoji, Volume One. Compared with the anime, the original is indeed richer. I also found that reading an e-book on a phone is a pleasant experience. My long attachment to paper reading may change because of it.
The first three sections each tell a small story. They are ghost stories, but the plots are carefully constructed and each has a meaning. The prose has a Japanese atmosphere, and the characters are drawn well. That is not easy. At the end of each story, I found myself lingering over it.
The first story is 'The Biwa Called Genjo Is Stolen by a Ghost.' A rosewood biwa in the imperial collection, Genjo, disappears. Late at night, a mournful sound comes from Rashomon. Minamoto no Hiromasa follows it and finds a ghost playing the instrument. The ghost is Hantada, an artisan from a foreign land who made Genjo a hundred years earlier. He became a ghost because he missed his dead wife. He stole the biwa to comfort his homesickness, and he fixated on Tamakusa, a palace woman who resembles his wife. Hiromasa goes to Rashomon with Abe no Seimei and the blind monk Semimaru. Semimaru plays with the ghost in a match of extraordinary skill. The ghost is moved, appears, and agrees to spend one night with Tamakusa before returning the biwa. The next day Seimei, Hiromasa, and Tamakusa come, accompanied by a samurai named Kashima Kichiji. Tamakusa follows the samurai's order, hides a short blade, and tries to kill the ghost, but fails and dies. The samurai shoots the ghost with a bow, and in the end the ghost bites him to death. Seimei sees through the ghost's secret technique of controlling people through names, but he does not destroy the ghost by force. He guides it to face its obsession. In the end the ghost willingly attaches its spirit to Genjo, and the biwa becomes sentient, able to play as it wishes.
This story highlights Seimei's idea of 'dissolving obsession' rather than eliminating it, and it shows the complicated emotional bond between humans and ghosts. I left a two-line comment in the e-book:
'A man who becomes a ghost and still misses his wife is a devoted lover. The ghost meant no harm, but the human carried the will to harm the ghost. The ghost was pitiable, and so was the palace woman who looked like his wife. Fortunately, Seimei acted with compassion and preserved the ghost's spirit.'
Why did the samurai want to kill the ghost? The story allows two inferences: either the ghost was a malicious evil spirit, or the samurai was simply charging around killing with a lone courage. From the ending, when Seimei gathers and preserves the ghost's spirit, Seimei clearly pitied it. That suggests the ghost was good. The samurai's blade was sharp, but it was raised against a good ghost. The small story is also a faint criticism of a certain samurai spirit.
The second story, 'The Gardenia Woman,' is about the monk Jusui, who copies the Heart Sutra for a long time. One day he accidentally omits the mouth radical from the character ru in the phrase yifu rushi, turning it into nü, 'woman.' He also drips ink over the mistake. After that, every night Jusui sees a white-clad woman in the corridor. She has a beautiful face but no mouth. She huddles and weeps without making a sound, unsettling Jusui and making him wither day by day. Minamoto no Hiromasa hears of it and asks Abe no Seimei for help. Seimei examines the sutra and immediately says the woman is formed from the obsession of a damaged character. The character ru without its mouth radical becomes nü; it has lost the ability to pronounce and cannot fully express the sutra's meaning, so it takes the form of a mouthless woman and weeps to remind the copyist to correct the error. Seimei tells Jusui to add a mouth radical to the character nü and restore it to ru. That night the white-clad woman appears in the corridor, smiles at Jusui, and dissolves into blue smoke. Jusui's trouble ends. The story uses the idea that writing itself has a spirit, and it embodies the notion that all things have souls.
In Japan, the concept that all things have souls is deeply rooted and has been passed down for centuries. It goes back to the Jomon period. Because people lived by hunting and gathering, they felt awe toward mountains, rivers, plants, animals, and natural phenomena, and attributed these to spiritual beings. That formed an early animistic faith. Shinto, which might be called the strangest religion in the world, has no unified doctrine or scripture but has deeply influenced the country. 'All things have souls' is the core of Shinto. Shinto believes in 'eight million gods' and holds that natural things, ancestors, and even objects have divinity. This idea has had a large impact on Japanese society. It shaped Japanese awe toward nature and influenced environmental awareness and ritual customs. Although Japan is modern, the idea is fully woven into society. It has also become an important creative core in Japanese anime and literature, and it makes nature worship a distinctive marker of Japanese culture, penetrating daily etiquette, aesthetics, and other levels.
The third story, 'Kurokawa no Nushi,' is about the cormorant fisherman Tadasuke, who kills a female otter and her cub to protect his fish. The otter's mate, Kurokawa no Nushi—an otter spirit who takes human form, wears black, has a black tail, and carries a fishy smell—wants revenge. Every night he uses magic to freeze Tadasuke and meets Tadasuke's granddaughter Ayako. Ayako begins to show strange signs: at midnight she is naked and eats raw fish. She becomes pregnant. Minamoto no Hiromasa asks Abe no Seimei for help on Tadasuke's behalf. Seimei arranges for Hiromasa to hide in a cage. When Kurokawa no Nushi appears, they ambush him, tie a rope around his tail, and force him to show his animal form. In the end Seimei does not kill Kurokawa no Nushi. He lets him take the child from Ayako's belly and so dissolves a revenge feud that crosses species.
On one level the story expresses the onmyoji idea of dissolving obsession rather than destroying it. On another, it shows the Buddhist idea of cause and effect that reached Japan from China. Good causes bring good results; evil causes bring evil results; good and evil are eventually repaid. But one detail is disturbing when you think about it: Kurokawa no Nushi's target is not Tadasuke but Tadasuke's granddaughter Ayako. If the crime is the killing of family, one would expect him to go directly after Tadasuke. Yet the Japanese idea of revenge seems to be 'you harm my family, so I will harm your family,' while the original target is selectively ignored. It is like the narration in the story of Kesagozen in Sakura and the Sword: 'Japanese moral teaching instilled in women the idea that in a major crisis, she is the one who must be sacrificed.' Tadasuke killed Kurokawa no Nushi's mate and cub, but in the end it is Ayako, the granddaughter, who bears all the harm. That leaves me sighing.