Kosodate-yūrei

The kosodate-yūrei is not a generic spirit of a dead mother but one specific story, told across almost all of Japan with the same skeleton. A confectioner keeps his shop open late and a pale woman dressed in white appears, buys malt candy and leaves without a word. She comes back the next night, and the next. When her money runs out she stops paying and beckons the confectioner to follow; he trails her to the cemetery, watches her vanish over a grave and hears a child crying beneath the earth. Opening the tomb they find the dead woman and, beside her, a living baby born down there, which the candy has been feeding. The Kyoto version dates the event to the fourth year of the Keicho era (1599), at the Rokudo crossroads, by the entrance to the old burial ground of Toribeno. The detail that holds the whole story together is the money: what the woman spends are the six coins, the rokumonsen placed in the coffin to pay the crossing of the river Sanzu. She spends one a night, and by the seventh day she has nothing left to pay with.

What sets the kosodate-yūrei apart from almost every other Japanese ghost is that she handles objects. She does not pass through walls or float: she walks into a shop, hands over a coin and carries off a wrapped parcel. She wears the white katabira of the shrouded dead, with no ornament in her hair, and in no version does she speak; when she wants to be followed, she points. The food changes with the region. In Kyoto it is ame, malt candy; elsewhere she buys mochi or dango, which is why the same story is also known as the ghost who bought rice cakes. In several versions the confectioner finds in the morning that the coins in his till have turned into dry leaves or into the offerings from a grave, the usual sign of dead men's money. Lafcadio Hearn collected a variant in Matsue and published it in 1894: there the shop stands in Nakabaramachi, by the Daioji cemetery, what is sold is midzu-ame, an amber malt syrup given to children when no milk could be had, and the woman pays one rin a night. Hearn closes the tale with the line that sums up the whole motif: love is stronger than death.

Both figures are women dead in childbirth and both appear at night with a baby, yet they behave in opposite ways. The ubume of the Konjaku monogatari-shū and of Toriyama Sekien's illustrated bestiary steps into the traveller's path, puts the child in his arms and asks him to hold it; the bundle grows heavier and heavier until it weighs like a boulder, and whoever endures is granted superhuman strength. The kosodate-yūrei asks nothing of anyone: she pays for what she buys and returns to the grave. One accosts, the other manages on her own. That is why the second reads as an exemplary tale rather than a fearsome apparition, and why preachers put it to use. The monk Gakkan included it in the early Edo period in his treatise on the four debts of gratitude, to speak of a mother's love. The frame is older than Japan: it descends from a Buddhist sutra about the king of Chandravati and has a close Chinese relative in Hong Mai's Yijian zhi, of the twelfth century, where a woman buys cakes instead of candy. Of the child it is told that he was raised at the temple and became a monk; the Kyoto version has him live to sixty-eight, and the north-eastern one gives him a name and identifies him with the priest Zuhaku.

The story has a material proof still standing. In the Higashiyama district of Kyoto, a step from the Rokudo crossroads, a shop called Minatoya has for centuries sold the very sweet the legend names: yūrei kosodate ame, the candy with which a ghost raised her child. It is amber, cut by hand, and tastes of malt. It is no souvenir invented for tourists: the premises stand where the entrance to the Toribeno charnel ground used to be, and the shop has done this since long before tourism existed. The legend also entered contemporary popular culture by a route almost nobody connects with it. Mizuki Shigeru, the artist who fixed the modern look of the yōkai, said that the child born inside the tomb was the germ of the character who would become the hero of his most famous series. It is one of those stories that survive because they are not frightening. In a catalogue of Japanese ghosts made almost entirely of grievances (the betrayed wife, the executed man, the poisoned servant, the exiled emperor), the kosodate-yūrei is the only one who returns neither to avenge herself on anyone nor to claim anything, but to do the shopping.