Iwa ni Hana

The entire second quarter at work was crazily busy, but recently I finally got more time to rest and recharge. Some part of my brain was yearning for period drama plus some sort of supernatural detective story (summer is traditionally the season for supernatural thrillers in Japan), so I went down to a bookstore and swept off the entire Kyōgokudō series (京極堂シリーズ) by Kyōgoku Natsuhiko (京極夏彦), of which Mouryou no Hako (魍魎の匣) was the second book. I have been curious to find out more about the onmyouji-detective character Chūzenji Akihiko (中禅寺秋彦) ever since I watched Madhouse’s excellent anime adaptation of Mouryou no Hako.

Mouryou no Hako

Anyway, I wish they had put some sort of health warnings on the novel covers – the stories are not only lengthy (they are thick as dictionaries) but also highly addictive (you just can’t bring yourself to put them down); they can cause considerable eye strain and destroy your sleep pattern. But I am glad that I read them – it has been ages since I got sucked into detective thrillers, not since Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum which I read back in university, I think. The Kyōgokudō novels are full of interesting ideas, which will take some time for my brain to properly sort them out. The stories themselves are like creepy kaidan tales from the Edo period, beefed up with logic in the style of Sherlock Holmes, and completed with psychological analysis of the Jungian school. The only thing I wish to say for now is that it became apparent to me that there is a distinct difference between horror (ホラー) and kaidan (怪談). Horror is creepy and the visual presentation often aims to turn your stomach – think the horror manga of Umezu Kazuo (楳図 かずお); but kaidan is always both creepy and beautiful in some dangerously attractive and eerie sense, or ayashii [妖しい]. I think an example of this would be Mononoke.

The Meaning of Ayashii

There are many words for “creepy” in Japanese and ayashii is one of them. If you look at the kanji 妖, it is comprised of 女 “woman” and 夭 “premature demise” – in other words, the premature demise of a woman makes for something creepy. I would like to stress that “creepy” is not really a good translation of the word ayashii. Ayashii refers to something creepy that is also at the same time enchantingly and bewitching attractive.

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