Kasane's spirit left Hanyū village twice

The headman of Hanyū village, the book says, had a problem that the nenbutsu had not solved.⁹ The village had freed a fourteen-year-old girl named Kiku from a spirit on the 28th of the second month of 1672, and on the 10th of the third the spirit came back, complaining that the stone Buddha promised for her had not been set up.¹⁰⁹ What worried the headman was what she might say next.¹¹ So far she had named the sins of the villagers’ dead; if she turned to the living, word could reach the local lord and the local administrator, and the village could be ruined.¹¹ Kiku was left alone in the house, and when Gonbei, on his way back to Gukyōji at Iinuma, brought word to the priest Yūten, Yūten told him to leave it alone.¹¹¹²

The book of 1690

Everything below about 1672 comes from one printed book, the Shiryō gedatsu monogatari kikigaki, “a record of what was heard about the freeing of a dead spirit” (our translation).¹ It was printed in Edo in 1690 by Yamagataya Kichibei, eighteen years after the events by our count.¹ Catalogues give the compiler’s name as Zanju, and who he was is not known.¹⁵ Atago Kuniyasu notes that the monks of Gukyōji, the temple at Iinuma where the book puts Yūten, share the character 残 in their names, and takes Zanju for one of them or a former one.¹⁵

The book is open about what it is. Its closing note says that the story was already going about, that its order and its words were in disorder and its facts unreliable, and that the compiler had asked Yūten, whom it calls Kenyo, again and again for his own telling.¹⁶

The colophon adds that the writer listened to Yūten several times and roughly asked around among the people of Hanyū.¹⁷ The compiler’s authority, in his own telling, is the priest’s word and village talk.

What the book records, day by day

In the book, the village’s own nenbutsu came first, and Yūten came afterwards.⁹¹²¹⁸ The book keeps a calendar, and this is what it gives.

The book gives Yoemon a motive and a method. Kasane was ugly and spiteful and owned some land, and he was a poor man who had married into her house and resolved to kill her.²² On the way home from pulling beans he pushed her into the Kinu river, put sand in her mouth, gouged at her eyes and strangled her, then carried the body to Hōzōji and had it buried as a sudden death.²³

Yūten does not arrive as a hero. The book has him say first that the matter should be left alone, because blame would fall on his master and his sect, and then decide to go.¹² At Kiku’s house he and six fellow students read sutras and mantras in turn without effect, then recited the nenbutsu, then had Kiku recite it, and Kasane left.¹⁸ The book puts the end of her resentment on the night of the 10th of the third month, about the hour of the boar.¹⁹

One line in the register

The book points at one document outside itself, the register of the dead at Hōzōji, the family temple.²³³

We have not seen the register. The only account of the three people that we found is the book itself. Atago calls the case one said to have happened at Hanyū in the spring of 1672, whose details can be known through the book.⁸

Why it was printed

Yūten lived from 1637 to 1718 and became abbot of Zōjōji in 1711.⁴ Scholars read the book in different ways. Takada Mamoru, as Atago quotes him, calls it a kanjin-bon, a Pure Land propaganda text, and sees its printing as part of Yūten’s mission work.⁵ Hattori Yukio, quoted by Kitashiro Nobuko, calls its content a sermon tale for spreading Pure Land teaching.⁶

Atago argues the opposite. In his reading, Yūten’s rite was a memorial service for a spirit in hell and not an exorcism, Pure Land doctrine allows no exorcism, and so the book cannot be a tract for the sect. He thinks it was printed to defend the rite to the sect, and to support the shogunate’s ban on abandoning children, which was issued again in 1690, and he ties the episode of the boy Sukē to that ban.⁷ The boy is the book’s second spirit, a child who, a villager says there, had been killed sixty-one years before on the order of the earlier Yoemon, Kasane’s father.²¹

Before 1690

The book was not the first telling. Kitashiro argues that the Kasane tale was already told in the Kokon inu chomonshū, which carries a preface dated 1684, and that it did not start as an episode in Yūten’s life story.²⁴²⁵ We know that text only through Atago, who quotes it as having Yūten, then a student at Gukyōji, lead fellow students to Hanyū, where the 1690 book has him refuse before he goes. He reads the change as a correction.²⁶

The temple’s other beginning

Hōzōji stands at Hanyū on the west bank of the Kinu, and the Nihon rekishi chimei taikei says it is known for Kasane’s grave.²⁷ The book says the stone Buddha was set up in the temple garden.²⁰ The same dictionary entry gives another beginning, citing a Sōma diary we have not seen: a farmer’s wife named Osugi drowned her stepson Sukē in 1612, and the daughter born the next year was named Kasane.²⁸ In the book, Sukē is a separate and later ghost, killed sixty-one years before 1672, and a stepson of Kasane’s father.²¹

Tomita Tetsunosuke adds that exhibitions at Hōzōji and the printed book carried the story to the cities.¹³

From kabuki to Enchō

By Tomita’s account the story reached kabuki in 1731, with Ōzumō Fujito Genji, and a play of 1823, Kesakake matsu Narita no rikken, carries a Kiyomoto piece called Kasane.²⁹³⁰ Okitsu Kaname dates Sanyūtei Enchō’s own performance of the tale to 1859.³¹

Enchō’s piece is not Kasane’s story. His narrator opens by calling it “the story of what came after Kasane”.³² It begins in Edo in the twelfth month of 1773 with a blind acupuncturist and moneylender, Minagawa Sōetsu, and a samurai named Fukami Shinzaemon.³³ Kasane comes in at Hanyū, where two of his characters walk by the pool that still carries her name, and the narrator stops to correct what he was told there.¹⁴

He gives instead a killing with her face pushed into sand, and puts Yūten at the pool, in training, with a mat and a gong.¹⁴ The book has the nenbutsu said in Kiku’s house, and has Yūten go only after a messenger comes.¹²¹⁸

The table sets the telling against the book, which is the only record we have, so it shows where the retellings part from it. It does not show that the book is right.