"How absurd of you," exclaimed Kihei, "to torment yourself thus! Up to the present time that clerk has done no single thing for which he could be blamed; and you have caused him to suffer cruelly.... Now if I should send him away, with his uncle, to another town, to establish a branch business, could you not endeavour to think more kindly of him?"
"If I do not see his face or hear his voice," the wife answered,—"if you will only send him away from this house,—then I think that I shall be able to conquer my hatred of him."
"Try to do so," said Kihei;—"for, if you continue to hate him as you have been hating him, he will certainly die, and you will then be guilty of having caused the death of a man who has done us nothing but good. He has been, in every way, a most excellent servant."
Then Kihei quickly made arrangements for the establishment of a branch house in another city; and he sent Rokubei there with the clerk, to take charge. And thereafter the ikiryō ceased to torment the young man, who soon recovered his health.
[1] Literally, "living spirit,"—that is to say, the ghost of a person still alive. An ikiryō may detach itself from the body under the influence of anger, and proceed to haunt and torment the individual by whom the anger was caused.
[2] An ikiryō is seen only by the person haunted.—For another illustration of this curious belief, see the paper entitled "The Stone Buddha" in my Out of the East, p. 171.