Yuureiyado no Aruji (Master of the Haunted Inn)

haunted inn Author: Hatsu Akiko
Imprint: Asuka Comics DX
Publisher: Kadokawa Shoten
ISBN:4-04-852482-8

Reviewed by Jeanne

Master of the Haunted Inn introduces us to a young man sometime in middle Meiji-- the late 1880s or early 1890s, by the look of things. He owns an inn where people are said to be able to see the ghosts of their loved ones. To this place comes a young woman who was married to a man she'd never seen before, an invalid whose dying wish was to wed her. He died on the same day as they met. Even with this history, she feels herself his wife and desires earnestly to see him again. We're definitely in ghost story country here, in the classic Japanese tradition where ghosts appear because their attachment to someone in this world, or vice-versa, is too strong to let them leave. In other stories we have lovers yearning for a last meeting, a little girl out looking for her father, and a young temple servant, dead many centuries, who cannot rest in peace.

Hatsu's visual style is a lot like Shinohara Udo's, but less irrita-- umm idiosyncratic than hers. (Though it has its own idiosyncrasies, mainly a fast and loose approach to body proportions.) Her subject matter is also close to much of Shinohara's 'weird tales' oeuvre, but to me it reads subtler and more poetic.

Anything else I could say about this story or the rest of the volume is a spoiler. So if you're going to read the series, stop here.

In the event, the ghosts seen at the young man's country inn turn out to be real human beings, and it looks as if we're dealing with a charming charlatan. The conclusion of the first story also suggests that we're dealing with a licentious charlatan as well. But read on. In fact our young guy is on the level, at least when he has to be.

We don't find out till the third story who he is. Akatsuki Seinosuke, no swindling fraud but a member of the nobility. If, as his sister says, the world was as the world should be, he'd be a daimyo and lord of a major fief. But the loss of the family position in the Meiji restoration doesn't seem to bother him particularly, if only because he looks to have been born well after Meiji began. And anyway, he's rich and noble and can afford to amuse himself by running haunted mansions and holding ghost story sessions and such. Umm- and such. He really *is* charming and licentious, even if he can also see ghosts and call them up as well. In fact, what he reminds me of is Motoni Modoru's Detective Bluecat done in an earlier period, more romantically, and with no traces of the upper-class twit about him. Motoni laughs at Bluecat's posturings. Though Akatsuki fancies himself nearly as much as that other young aristocrat, one has no desire to laugh at him at all. Like Bluecat, he happily swings both ways, though here more romantically than sexually. When not pursuing a liaison with his much older sister's best friend, he's being gallant with the living ghost of the woman's niece. (Living ghost- the spirit of a live person that gets free of their body and goes wandering.) But he's equally happy to console the ghost of the murdered o-chigo-san (temple catamite) whose desire for his samurai lover has kept his body uncorrupted through centuries, waiting the moment when the man will find it.

This is a fun read for the period feel alone and the delicate aestheticism of the ghost stories, but it also has some very solid plotting and characterization. My favorite story is perhaps the second one, a twisty O. Henryish tale about the aftermath of a failed double suicide between a young man and the woman he loves who is about to be sold into prostitution. And the take on ghosts is not only charming, it feels very convincing. Angels, Rilke said, often cannot tell whether they are moving among the living or the dead. In these stories, very often, neither can we. Ghosts are just there, for Akatsuki at least, who when he goes out blossom viewing is just as likely to meet the former owner of the property, dead three generations ago, as a living companion.