Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai
The Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai ( Japanese 百 物語 怪 談 会 , about "collection of 100 supernatural stories") is a popular game in the Edo period in which ghost stories were told, according to superstition, when the hundredth story was completed perform by ghosts. The roots of this custom were borrowed from Buddhist belief .
procedure
The participants gathered in the summer after dark in a place where three separate rooms were used. In the third room, a total of one hundred andon (paper lanterns) were lit and a mirror was placed on a small table. Afterwards, as soon as it was completely dark, a meeting of all participants was held in the first room and each of them in turn told a story of ghosts or supernatural occurrences (so-called kaidan ), which mostly referred to popular legends or alleged reports of ghost sightings. As soon as a ghost story was told, the narrator walked over to the third room and put out one of the lanterns and glanced in the mirror before going back to the first room. As the night progressed, the room became darker and darker with every further kaidan , until the light in the room went out in the last, the hundredth story, which, according to the belief, gave the spirits conjured up by the stories the opportunity to enter the real world. It was often the case that many of the participants broke off up to the 99th story for fear of raising evil spirits.
Origins
Although the exact origin of the custom cannot be precisely clarified, it is assumed that the Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai was originally practiced by the samurai as a test of courage. In the children's story Otogi Monogatari by Ogita Ansei from 1660, a version of the game is described in which several young samurai tell each other legends in this way. As one of them finishes the hundredth story and extinguishes the lantern, he suddenly notices a huge hand that tries to grab him from above. Several other samurai hide in fear while the narrator waves his sword and it turns out that the "hand" was just the shadow of a small spider.
After the Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai became popular in aristocratic circles, it spread to the working and lower classes. Many people even went on trips to collect new legends and stories from the country, as the game had aroused increasing interest. The stories often showed elements of the Buddhist principle of karma or deal with the revenge of people from the hereafter for injustice suffered.
With the advent of print media suitable for the masses, these monogatari became a true pop culture and resulted in a sharp increase in the publication of books on the subject of Kaidan with legends from all over Japan and China. In 1677 the first compilation of this kind was published under the name Shokoku Hyakumonogatari (“100 stories from many countries”), which became famous as a collection of international fairy tales - a rare occurrence at the time. The editors also claimed that each of the stories was true. Even after the game went out of style, books in the Hyakumonogatari genre were hugely popular for a long time.
Mentioned in later works
In the 18th century, the painter Maruyama Ōkyo was one of the first artists of the time to create a large number of paintings of Yūrei , the Japanese ghosts that were conjured up in the game. In the modern era, the Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai found their way into a variety of Japanese horror films and urban legends that borrow from the stories of the game.
In 2002 Fuji TV broadcast the television series Kaidan Hyakumonogatari based on the classic game, in which traditional kaidan was told. The series consisted of eleven episodes and dealt among other things with the legend of the Yuki-onna .
The phenomenon was also received sporadically in the West, for example in the docu-drama series Paranormal State by A&E Network , in an episode of members of the Penn State Paranormal Research Society in which the old Japanese game Game of One Hundred Candles during an investigation into one cursed college dormitory, which is an obvious reference.
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ A Brief History of Kaidan ( Memento of the original from October 3, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
literature
- Steven Addiss: Japanese Ghosts and Demons , USA, George Braziller, Inc., 1986, ISBN 0-8076-1126-3