The Day Commodus Killed a Rhino
Understanding the Roman Games Maximus’s much greater audience capacity than the Colosseum implies minority taste for ‘Death in the Afternoon’ (or morning or evenings).
Fortean titbits include: pregames mutual strangling by Saxon gladiators; a novice fighter’s suicide by choking on a public lavatory sponge (Roman bumcleaner); and circus fans sniffing horse dung to check the quality of their favourites’ fodder.
Devilled details: Dio Chryostom is mis-dated; Fronto is misrepresented on Bread and Circuses; and Tertullian’s crowdslogan ‘Christianos ad leones’ confirms the lion cafeterias were frequently open. More might have been mentioned about women performers, e.g. Petronius’s British-style chariot combatant; and I fancy many rather than “few” free poor men signed up in hopes of gladiatorial fame and fortune. Surprisingly little use is made of the work of Kathleen Coleman, the doyenne of the subject and advisor to Gladiator; and John Traupman’s Princeton thesis is available in print.
Toner bashes the Romans for their sadistic pleasures, but they had no monopoly on this. Read Casanova on the crowd revelling in the torture-execution of would-be French regicide Damien, Boswell on jostling for the best view of Tyburn hangings and the regular tales from North Korea, not to mention ‘snuff films’ and violent pornographic websites. Details, expense, and scale may vary; human nature does not.
The plethora of books on these Roman horrors clearly implies an insatiable thirst among readers.
One thing neither Toner nor anyone else can explain: how did ‘rhino’ come to mean ‘money’ in old British slang? The growing popularity of Japanese, or J-Horror, amongst Western audiences is bringing more entities like The Ring’s Sadako into our popular culture; the problem is, for the most part, we aren’t entirely sure of just what it is we are seeing. This is what Zack Davisson aims to rectify in Yurei: The Japanese Ghost.
Davisson works primarily as a translator and writer of Japanese language and culture. A notable work includes his translation of Mizuki Shigeru’s Showa: A History of Japan series. Davisson also maintains a popular blog, Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai, in which he translates and presents Japanese ghost lore and weird tales. Yurei: The Japanese Ghost expands somewhat on the blog, exploring what Yurei mean to Japanese culture.
This is a book of many layers. Immensely enjoyable, it makes a core feature of Japanese life accessible by virtue of the fact that it is extremely well written, taking the reader on a lively journey through history, culture and religion.
It is clear that Davisson is passionate about his work, and his enthusiasm is infectious. He makes it clear just how important the supernatural is to Japan. It is a culture that is very comfortable with the notion of spirits of the dead, right into the modern era – evident in the casual way Davisson describes his friends noting he and his wife shared their home with a Yurei when they lived in a cultural apartment in Ikeda, just outside Osaka.
One thing that Davisson is quick to point out is that a Yurei and a Western ghost are somewhat different things. The term Yurei doesn’t translate as ‘ghost’.
Western ghosts, he argues, are storytelling devices of an interchangeable nature, whilst Yurei follow a strict set of rules. They tend to dissipate when they fulfil their aims, very rarely hanging around in the same way as, for instance, a Scottish ghost.
Yurei have a central position in Japan. Davisson discusses Lafcadio Hearn’s notion of The Rule of The Dead, where the spirits of the dead look out for the living, so long as the living make the adequate tributes and prayers, mostly during Obon, the season when spirits return from the afterlife to pay a visit to their living nearest and dearest.
Japan even has three ‘superstar’ Yurei, Oiwa, Otsuyu and Okiku, whose influence has reverberated down the centuries. These three are still feared, and respected, today. Davisson explores the origins of the tales of all three in his unravelling of the development of strange stories, kaidan, from the tales told in the Kojiki, to the mania for strange tales in the Edo period. This gave rise to a parlour game, Hyakomonogatari Kaidankai, where the players light 100 candles, extinguishing them one by one as each tells a bizarre tale. Kabuki theatre also met the thirst for kaidan by producing terrifying plays, the appearance of a terrifying Yurei thrilling the audience. Davisson makes note of the influence of artist Maruyama Okyo’s painting The Ghost of Oyuki in providing the standard image of what a Yurei looked like, as well as describing the different types of Yurei you may encounter.
Of particular significance is Davisson’s profiling of Lafcadio Hearn, the writer famous for bringing kaidan to the West with his translations, as well as his general documentation of Japanese life. Hearn seems to have fallen into relative obscurity with the general public. Davisson offers an excellent introduction and good pointers of where you might start if you wish to explore his work.
There is certainly a lot packed into what is quite a short book. As well as bringing Yurei to life, for want of a better phrase, it may also have the after-effect of some rather eerie dreams.