Each of us started out alone. Vengeance was in our hearts but, to begin with, had no direction to follow. The jolt from pure happiness to sudden death left us confused and our reaction, once we had regained ourselves, was to walk in the direction we had seen him take after leaving us to nature.
He had left quite a trail of shattered lives across our land. Seemingly untouchable himself he was always able to carry on wooing, marrying, killing and taking, never thinking about anything other than his own needs and plans, both short and long term.
Slowly we came together, our hopes for revenge joining as we followed his trail, finding further vessels left in his wake to add to our number and to help us get closer to our quest’s end. Each one made us move faster so that we didn’t swell our numbers too much before being in a position to stop them growing any more.
And slowly we caught him up- a modestly wealthy man always on the move: one eye roving around for his next victim, the other peering over his shoulder for any followers seeking the man believed to have committed near identical crimes listed under many names in many places. But not us.
One glorious day we caught him lying in an orchard, feeding his sweets to a would-be victim by moonlight and we fell upon him.
Now he spends all his time with us, forever learning the results of his ways.
He had left quite a trail of shattered lives across our land. Seemingly untouchable himself he was always able to carry on wooing, marrying, killing and taking, never thinking about anything other than his own needs and plans, both short and long term.
Slowly we came together, our hopes for revenge joining as we followed his trail, finding further vessels left in his wake to add to our number and to help us get closer to our quest’s end. Each one made us move faster so that we didn’t swell our numbers too much before being in a position to stop them growing any more.
And slowly we caught him up- a modestly wealthy man always on the move: one eye roving around for his next victim, the other peering over his shoulder for any followers seeking the man believed to have committed near identical crimes listed under many names in many places. But not us.
One glorious day we caught him lying in an orchard, feeding his sweets to a would-be victim by moonlight and we fell upon him.
Now he spends all his time with us, forever learning the results of his ways.
Note: These Obake stories were written after a visit to a Japanese prints exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (Japanese Ghosts and Demons: Ukiyo-e prints from the Ashmolean). I bought a little book of postcards, the text on the back of which inspired these stories, the quotations from the titles coming from it:
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