Paper short abstract:

Using yūrei Kasane's different version tales as an example to analyse how was the contest between Confucian study and Buddhist didactic dogma was reflected in the development of Yūrei's narrative throughout Tokugawa Japan.

Paper long abstract:

Over the centuries ghostly apparitions of yūrei have bedevilled and bewitched scores of Japanese scholars, giving rise to a significant body of literature which takes as its starting point the teachings of the Kokugaku nativist Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843) and the works of panthropologist Komatsu Kazukiho (1947-present). Often translated into English as simply 'ghost' (Komatsu 2017), the Japanese yūrei has since found fame as part of a global pantheon of supernatural creatures and beings (Davison 2015).

Through the analysis of multiple sources and media, my research seeks to cast a light on popular yūrei narratives as they developed in the Tokugawa period in order to expose a hitherto unexplored tension between Confucian moral codes and Buddhist didactic dogma. I posite this tension as a dialectic between forms of social control imposed by the Tokugawa Bakufu and a naturalized system of local laws.

My research endeavours to produce a comprehensive and critical examination of the development of this narrative. The analysis begins in the early Edo period and concludes in the initial decades of the Meiji Restoration. It looks to texts (monogatari and yomihon), pictorial references (nikuhitsuga and ukiyoe) and the stage (rakugo and kabuki) as primary sources in interrogating accounts of causation and methods of dealing with yūrei in an attempt to identify an over-arching ontology of the period. It also seeks to identify the core ideologies implicit in each source.

Thus far I have primarily analyzed the various incarnations of the story of Kasane, a woman-turned-yūrei. It begins with the first known apparition of Kasane's tale in 1684 and concludes with the well-known Rakugo of 1888. My findings have led me to approach the Tokugawa yūrei narratives as a syncretism of Confucian social norms and a Buddhist cosmology, which is often combined with Kokugaku aesthetics. These ideologies are revealed as being in a state of tension with each competing to establish a definitive ontological explanation of yūrei.