Obon and scary stories by Lafcadio Hearn!

With so many other things going on lately, I darn near forgot that this is Obon Season in Japan. Then again, I am not in Japan either, so I suppose I have a good excuse for forgetting. Nevertheless, Obon Season, from mid-July to mid-August roughly is a time in popular culture for scary stories given the traditional focus on revering the dead, and the focus on Buddhist “hungry ghosts“. And one of the greatest authors in Japan on ghost stories was the Greco-Irish author, Lafcadio Hearn.

A few months ago, I finished the reading his well-known book, Kwaidan (Tuttle edition), which included spooky stories that I had posted in the past for Halloween including my favorite Mujina. For Obon, I wanted to post another story by Hearn from Kwaidan titled “Jūroku-zakura” (十六桜), or “16th day cherry-blossom”.

This brief story is about a famous cherry tree in the province of Iyo that was said to blossom every year on the sixteenth day of the first month (pre-modern calendar), which is deep in the heart of winter (大寒 daikan, or “great cold“), rather than in spring like most cherry blossoms. According to the story, the tree is possessed by the ghost of a man.

Lafcadio Hearn then explains that the samurai was from the province of Iyo, and for many generations, the tree had grown in the family’s garden:

He had played under that tree when he was a child and his parents and grandparents and ancestors had hung to its blossoming branches, season after season for more than a hundred years, bright strips of colored paper inscribed with poems of praise. He himself became very old,—outliving all his children; and there was nothing in the world left for him to love except that tree. And lo! in the summer of a certain year the tree withered and died!

Distraught, the elder samurai withered away too, even after his neighbors bought and planted a new cherry tree for him. Finally, he resolved to save the old tree. On the sixteenth day of the first month:

…Alone he went into his garden, and bowed down before the withered tree, and spoke to it, saying: “Now deign, I beseech you, once more to bloom,— because I am going to die in your stead.”…Then under that tree he spread a white cloth, and divers coverings, and sat down upon the coverings, and performed hara-kiri after the fashion of a samurai. And the ghost of him went into the tree, and made it blossom in that same hour.

And the tree is said to bloom on the same wintry day each year ever since…

I’ll post more Hearn stories in the coming days for Obon, rather than wait until Halloween, in keeping with the blog theme. Enjoy!

P.S. Post was accidentally published in draft-form earlier, so apologies for any confusion.