The Lady Aoi
Posted: May 19, 2013 Filed under: Books, Ghost Stories | Tags: Japan, Noh theater, theater, Yukio Mishima 3 Comments »A friend turned my husband and me on to Mishima’s Five Modern Noh Plays; I’ve read a couple of them now. I wasn’t familiar with Noh plays, other than the fact the Kurosawa borrowed some Noh stylings for Throne of Blood (the stylized, dance-like movements, and makeup made to look like Noh masks). Mishima’s adaptations have given me a place to start.
The two plays that I’ve read are both ghost stories (all five plays are supernatural). Sotoba Komachi is a karma fable about a beautiful woman who was cruel to her lover, and is now, as an old and homeless woman, being tormented by his spirit. Mishima’s retelling is fairly faithful to the original: the stupa that the old woman sits on is updated to a park bench; the priests, to a poet.
Sotoba Komachi was pretty good, but I liked the second play that I read even better: The Lady Aoi. The original play, Aoi No Uye, is itself taken from The Tale of Genji. The Lady Aoi of the title is Lord Genji’s wife; though her marriage to Genji hasn’t been all that great, the two have reconciled, and Lady Aoi has only recently won a little roadside battle with one of Genji’s former lovers, an older woman and former Crown Princess named Lady Rokujo (Aoi had Rokujo’s carriage driven off the road when it was in the way of her own carriage). Rokujo’s jealous spirit has already left her body once before, to kill Yugao, the woman who replaced her as Genji’s lover. Now, her spirit is tormenting Aoi.
Neither Aoi or Genji are in the play; it begins in Aoi’s sick room, with a folded red kimono placed onstage to represent Aoi. Aoi’s attendants have called in a witch to summon whatever evil spirit is tormenting Aoi. The witch succeeds in summoning Rokujo’s spirit, which pours out Rokujo’s jealousy and bile. She becomes so angry that she transforms herself into a demon and attacks Aoi.
A demon-mask. From The Nō Plays of Japan, by Arthur Waley, 1921.Aoi’s attendants rush to fetch a priest, who confronts the Rokujo-demon. The priest’s prayers cause Rokujo to repent her ways. Aoi dies anyway.
Here’s a snippet from a traditional Noh performance of Aoi No Uye (the first 1:20 or so of the video). This is the scene where the Lady Rokujo turns into a demon, and then is exorcised by the priest. I think the foot stamp the priest makes at the end of the scene is the traditional signal that the ghost has disappeared.
The comedy play in the second half of the video (about two servants who have been tied up to keep them from drinking all the sake) looks fun, too.
Mishima’s adaptation starts with the original play, and takes it somewhere familiar, and yet so different.
Solomon and the Demons
Posted: May 15, 2013 Filed under: Books, Folklore, Folktale | Tags: Apocrypha, demonology, King Solomon, M. R. James, Project Gutenberg, testament of solomon 4 Comments »… you’ll never see a man exactly six feet tall, because that was the height of the Lord Jesus.
I like non-canonical Christian folklore (meaning, folklore that’s not in the Old or New Testament). Growing up as I did, in a Catholic family, Bible stories never felt like “myth” in the same way that say, stories about the Roman or Greek or Hindu pantheons did. Bible stories felt (and still feel) more like “history” — they are the stories I grew up with, stories I’ve always known. From the inside, I don’t always appreciate the universe-explaining, myth-making capacity of the Judeo-Christian tradition in the same way I appreciate it in traditions that I didn’t grow up in. Stories and tidbits like Six-Foot Jesus, or the (very) old Irish story of Moses and the origin of Leprechauns put me back on the outside again. It’s good to be there once in a while.
I suspect that M.R. James, who by all accounts was a devout Christian, felt a little of what I feel. This is from the preface to his text Old Testament Legends (Being stories out of some of the less-known apocryphal books of the Old Testament):
Perhaps I have now said enough to show of what sort the tales are that are told in this book—some of them told for the first time in English. They are not true, but they are very old; some of them, I think, are beautiful, and all of them seem to me interesting.
The story that I retell below, of King Solomon and the demon Ephippas (with a bit of backstory), is originally from The Testament of Solomon. The text, which describes in the first person how King Solomon gained power over demons and forced them to build the temple in Jerusalem, dates back to somewhere between the first and fifth centuries CE. It is of Greek, probably Christian origin.
In addition to the translation (synopsis, really) in Old Testament Legends, Dr. James also wrote a couple of commentaries about The Testament of Solomon, available here and here. He also made use of the myth in “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook,” from Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. That’s where I first learned of it, and I always did wonder where it came from. Now I know.
Anyway. To the story. The quotes are taken from Old Testament Legends.
Before They Were The Simpsons…
Posted: May 8, 2013 Filed under: Musings, True Life | Tags: chain tale, film, Homer Groening, Margaret Groening, Matt Groening, Simpsons Leave a comment »I was sorry to read this morning that Margaret Groening, Matt Groening’s mother, passed away last month. Didn’t she have a great smile?
Photo: GawkerMargaret’s son Matt is the author behind the old Life In Hell comic, and of course, the creator of The Simpsons. The Simpsons (their names, at least) were inspired by Matt’s real life family: parents Homer and Margaret (don’t call her Marge!), siblings Lisa and Maggie (as well as Patty and Mark, who may or may not be Bart, I suppose).
Someone posted this charming little film from 1969, by Homer Groening. Little Matt is telling his baby sister Maggie a story about Matt and Lisa’s adventures. It’s a chain tale: the kind where the action accumulates and repeats, like The Gingerbread Man, who gets chased first by a little old woman, then by a little old man who is in turn chased by the little old woman, and so on. Chain tales are a lot of fun for oral storytelling, if you can deliver them well.
And little Matt does. Enjoy.
The Living Head
Posted: May 5, 2013 Filed under: Folklore, Folktale | Tags: diwata, enkanto, filipino folklore, food origin myths, JSTOR, orange-trees, Visayan 4 Comments »Apologies for not having posted for a while. I hope to pick up the pace again, soon, but in the meantime here’s a short, sweet (and mysterious) food origin myth collected in Panay (one of the Visayan islands in the Philippines) in 1904.
Once upon a time lived a man and his wife who had no children. They desperately wanted a child, and so they prayed to their God, Diva:
“Please, Lord,” they prayed. “We want a son so badly. He doesn’t have to be perfect, we’ll gladly accept him however you see fit to give him to us. Even if he were nothing but a head, we would be so happy.”
Ask and you shall receive. Diva took pity on the couple, and he gave them a son — a son who was nothing but a head. His parents were as happy as they promised they would be, and took loving care of Head (that’s what they named him, apparently). Head grew up to be a good son to his parents.
One day the chief’s daughter passed the house where Head and his parents lived. Once Head laid eyes on her, he fell hopelessly in love, and thought of nothing but marrying her. He begged his mother to go to the chief and ask him for his daughter’s hand. Head’s mother refused.
“The chief would never let his daughter marry only a head.”
But Head gave his mother no peace. Finally, just to quiet him, Head’s mother went to the chief and told him of her son’s request. Of course, the chief refused. Head’s mother returned home with the news.
Heartbroken, Head went downstairs into the garden and began to sink into the ground.
“Head, come back up,” called his mother. “It’s time to eat.”
“Sink! sink! sink!” cried Head.
“Head, please, come back up,” called his mother again.
“Sink! sink! sink!” was all Head would say, and he continued to say it until he sank beneath the ground and disappeared. His mother rushed down to try to take him back up, but she couldn’t. Some days later a tree sprang up from where Head had disappeared; the tree eventually bore large round fruit almost as large as a boy’s head.
And that’s where oranges came from.
Image: WikipediaMy retelling is based on a version collected by Berton L. Maxfield and W. H. Millington and published in 1906 in The Journal of American Folklore. The article, Visayan Folk-Tales I, is available free from JSTOR, and contains several more stories.
I confess — I don’t really get this one. I suspect it’s an imperfectly remembered version of a more elaborate dema deity myth, but who knows. I found an interesting Ifugao story about coconuts having sprung from a buried head, but I want to do a little research on that one before I retell it… .
Wikipedia tells me that oranges probably originated in Southeast Asia, which I never knew; I tend to associate them with the Mediterranean.
I also can’t find anything about a Visayan deity named Diva, but diwatas are nature deities, like enkanto, who live in trees and give blessings to people who bring them offerings — and curses to people who disturb them or the trees that they live in. The term diwata probably comes from the term devata, which denotes a Hindu demi-god. Deva is the Hindu term for a deity.
Someday, I would like to seriously track down how the Hindu pantheon and mythology worked its way from India eastward into Indonesia and Malaysia and eventually to the Philippines. Someday….
Life From Death: Dema Deities
Posted: April 21, 2013 Filed under: Books, Folklore, Folktale | Tags: browsing my bookshelf, fiilipino folklore, food origin myths, Indonesian folklore, japanese folklore, manga 5 Comments »This is the story that started my current mini-obsession with food origin myths: the story of Ogetsuhime, as mentioned in volume 13 of the horror manga The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. Note that the panels read right to left (and so do the voice balloons).
Ogetsuhime is a Shinto goddess of food and grain, and is also associated with Inari (or Oinari), the goddess of rice. The story above is similar to the story of Dewi Sri, the Javanese rice goddess, that I posted a few days ago. Though the vomiting and defecating of the banquet food in the Japanese tale is… different.
There is an Indonesian tale (from the Molucca Islands) with the same motif: Hainuwele, the coconut girl.
Diving into the Tweetstream
Posted: April 16, 2013 Filed under: Musings, True Life | Tags: blogging, finally, twitter 3 Comments »I finally went and did it. Multo now tweets. Please follow me to get updates on the blog, as well as on whatever strangeness I happen to be reading at any given moment.
It will be a challenge to keep it all to 140 characters.
How Rice Came to Earth: A Javanese Folktale
Posted: April 15, 2013 Filed under: Folklore, Folktale | Tags: food origin myths, Indonesia, Indonesian folklore, Javanese folklore, rice 11 Comments »Another manifestation of my current fascination with food origin myths. Rice is a staple food in Indonesia and the rest of East and Southeast Asia, so a divine (if gory) origin isn’t surprising. The motifs in this tale have similarities to Indian folklore, as well.
Once upon a time, Lord Guru, the leader of all the gods, decided to build a new meetinghouse in heaven. He tasked all the lesser gods to help him. One god brought wood, another sand; one made tiles. Everyone pitched in.
Everyone, that is, except Anta (or Anantaboga), the snake god. Anta wanted very much to help — but how? He had no arms, no legs. He could neither carry anything, nor build. As Anta pondered his situation, he cried three tears. As the tears touched the ground, they turned into three large, beautiful eggs.
Image: Wikipedia
