Tales of Old Japan - Maybe You Like It

spirit, and by his prayers and admonitions caused it to cease from troubling
the living.
The laying of disturbed spirits appears to form one of the regular functions
of the Buddhist priests; at least, we find them playing a conspicuous
part in almost every ghost-story.
About thirty years ago there stood a house at Mitsumé, in the Honjô of
Yedo, which was said to be nightly visited by ghosts, so that no man
dared to live in it, and it remained untenanted on that account. However,
a man called Miura Takéshi, a native of the province of Oshiu, who came
to Yedo to set up in business as a fencing-master, but was too poor to
hire a house, hearing that there was a haunted house, for which no tenant
could be found, and that the owner would let any man live in it rent
free, said that he feared neither man nor devil, and obtained leave to occupy
the house. So he hired a fencing-room, in which he gave his lessons
by day, and after midnight returned to the haunted house. One night, his
wife, who took charge of the house in his absence, was frightened by a
fearful noise proceeding from a pond in the garden, and, thinking that
this certainly must be the ghost that she had heard so much about, she
covered her head with the bed-clothes and remained breathless with terror.
When her husband came home, she told him what had happened;
and on the following night he returned earlier than usual, and waited for
the ghostly noise. At the same time as before, a little after midnight, the
same sound was heard—as though a gun had been fired inside the pond.
Opening the shutters, he looked out, and saw something like a black
cloud floating on the water, and in the cloud was the form of a bald man.
Thinking that there must be some cause for this, he instituted careful inquiries,
and learned that the former tenant, some ten years previously,
had borrowed money from a blind shampooer, 84 and, being unable to
pay the debt, had murdered his creditor, who began to press him for his
money, and had thrown his head into the pond. The fencing-master accordingly
collected his pupils and emptied the pond, and found a skull
at the bottom of it; so he called in a priest, and buried the skull in a
temple, causing prayers to be offered up for the repose of the murdered
man's soul. Thus the ghost was laid, and appeared no more.
The belief in curses hanging over families for generations is as common
as that in ghosts and supernatural apparitions. There is a strange
84.The apparently poor shaven-pated and blind shampooers of Japan drive a thriving
trade as money-lenders. They give out small sums at an interest of 20 per cent. per
month—210 per cent. per annum—and woe betide the luckless wight who falls into
their clutches.
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