A powerful relic of the old clinging love of the gruesome is the story of Ingwa-banashi. The daimyō's wife knew that she was dying; and she thought of many things, especially of her husband's favourite, the Lady Yukiko, who was nineteen years old. She begged her husband to send for the Lady Yukiko, whom, she said, she loved as a sister. After the dying wife had told Lady Yukiko it was her wish that she should become the wife of their dear lord, she begged that Yukiko would carry her on her back to see the cherry-bloom.
As a nurse turns her back to a child, that the child may cling to it, Yukiko offered her shoulders to the wife, and said:—
"Lady, I am ready: please tell me how I best can help you."
"Why, this way!" responded the dying woman, lifting herself with an almost superhuman effort by clinging to Yukiko's shoulders. But as she stood erect, she quickly slipped her thin hands down over the shoulders, under the robe, and clutched the breasts of the girl, and burst into a wicked laugh.
"I have my wish!" she cried—"I have my wish for the cherry-bloom, but not the cherry-bloom of the garden!... I could not die before I got my wish. Now I have it!—oh, what a delight!"
And with these words she fell forward upon the crouching girl, and died.
When the attendants tried to lift the body from Yukiko's shoulders, they found that the hands of the dead had grown into the quick flesh of the breasts of the girl. And they could not be removed. A skilful physician was called, and he decided that the hands could be amputated only at the wrists, and so this was done. But the hands still clung to the breasts;
and there they soon darkened and dried up like the hands of a person long dead.
Yet this was only the beginning of the horror.
Withered and bloodless though they seemed, those hands were not dead. At intervals they would stir—stealthily, like great grey spiders. And nightly thereafter,—beginning always at the Hour of the Ox,—they would clutch and compress and torture. Only at the Hour of the Tiger the pain would cease.
Yukiko cut off her hair, and became a mendicant-nun.
Every day she prayed to the dead for pardon, and every night the torture was renewed. This continued for more than seventeen years until Yukiko was heard of no more.
Shadowings[36] (13) appeared the next year, 1900. Of this volume the Bookman says:—
[ [36] Copyright, 1900, by Little, Brown and Company.
"He gives us several essays upon matters Japanesque, which obviously involve no small amount of erudition and patient research. Such are his papers upon the various species of Sémi, or Japanese singing-locusts, and on the complicated etiquette of Japanese female names. But the distinctive feature of this volume is the first half, which is given up to a collection of curious tales by native writers, weird, uncanny, little stories, most of them, of ghouls and wraiths, and vampires, or at least the nearest Japanese equivalents for such Occidental spectres." (316.)
The Athenæum does not find "Shadowings" equal to the volume "Exotics." It thinks that Hearn is "perilously near exhausting his repertory of Kokin [one-stringed fiddle] themes."
"The stories with which the present volume opens have no particular merit: they have lost their chief and real advantage—their local colour—in Hearnesque translation, and seem to be little more than suggestions or drafts of 'nouvelles,' out of which skilful hands might perhaps have made something much better. A good example is the story of the Screen Maiden, which is a most lame presentment of a charming motif. The chapters on female names, on sémi, couplets and 'Old Japanese Songs' are more interesting, but only to those who possess a considerable knowledge of old Japanese life and literature.... Of the 'Old Japanese Songs'—where is the proof of their antiquity?—much the best is the dance-ballad of the dragon-maid, who bewitched a yamabushi, and chased him over moor and hill and river, until the temple of Dojo was reached, under the great bell of which the trembling hill-warrior or outlaw (yamabushi were such originally in all probability) hid himself, whereupon the dragon-maid wrapped her body round the bell once and again and the third time the bell melted and flowed away like boiling water. And with it, according to the legend, flowed away the ashes of the unwilling object of the dragon-maid's affections, consumed not through love, but through disdain." (300.)