by Anna Kunnecke
When I was in first grade, I used to climb the hill to see my friend Yayoi-chan. She lived in a rambling old-style Japanese yashiki with her mother, her father, some siblings, and their grandmother. Yayoi and her grandmother were close, and the two of them would have long talks and work on Yayoi's homework together most evenings, but I never got a good clear glimpse of the grandmother.
Her grandmother, you see, had passed away several years before.
This was an accepted part of their family's life, that obaachan continued on in her home with them as the same benevolent presence she'd always been. Sometimes we would be sitting at the table and books and papers would rustle around, or something would fall off a shelf, or we'd leave the room for a second and come back to find things rearranged--oh, that's obaachan, Yayoi would say matter-of-factly. There was an old woman who was always in the background, doing dishes, folding laundry, sweeping the yard--and that was obaachan too.
Am I remembering correctly? Did I really see the ghost of my friend's grandmother? I have no idea, but she's there in my memory, and whether she got there through my eyes or through my imagination, I can't say. I do know that the path through the bamboo to Yayoi-chan's house was peopled with less-friendly spirits, crows or angry ghosts who would flap around my head and kick up the gravel on the path. I ran through this part of the journey in a blind terror, and I would have died rather than go at dusk.
My Japanese friends will casually tell of supernatural encounters that would have most westerners speeding for a couch and a prescription. I spent my childhood scared of lots of things, but at the top of the list were ghosts, spirits, and ghouls. Spooky moments abounded: odd people squatting in the corners of rooms, footsteps following behind me when no one was there, a persistent sense of someone watching me from across the room when I was alone. It scared me almost to death.
My daughter, however, is not terrified of ghosts in the least. In fact, she loves to talk about obake. Her new favorite song is about the five little ghosts who have ice cream for their 3pm oyatsu (snack). She performs it with great gusto and lots of exclamation marks and much vociferous waving of hands. Sometimes she'll point to the ceiling, grin, and say "Mommy, there's an obake on the ceiling!" and then we'll wave it out the door and say, "Goodbye, ghost!" When her teachers want to keep kids out of a room they'll threaten, "Obake ga deruyo!!" (a ghost will come out of there!). I was horrified at first, but the kids are obviously in on the joke and scream with delight.
For this I am grateful, and can take no credit.
All credit goes to her Japanese preschool, where ghosts and beasties of the oni variety are just part of a panoply of fantastic characters that swim around the edges of myth and reality. On setsubun no hi the kids pelt beans at a cardboard horned oni to chase away demons, and at tanabata they tie construction paper wishes to a bamboo branch to send out into the ether. My daughter, along with the other kids, accepts that the spirits are part of life and they have a place among us.
I'm taking notes.
