Uryuudou Yumebanashi (Dreams of the Rainy Willow Store)

rainy willow Author: Hatsu Akiko
Imprint: Nemurenu yoru no kimyou na hanashi comics
Publisher: Asahi Sonorama
ISBN4-257-90180-2

Reviewed by Jeanne

You want an immersion course in tanbi, this will do. Its aestheticism starts with the publishing company, of all the unlikely things-- 'Strange tales for sleepless nights Comics.' Proceed to the title. 'Dream stories of the rainy willow store.' Add the tender pastels of the cover illo, and it's obvious where we are. Odd and beautiful goings-on in the hazy nights of spring when things are unclear to the eye and you never know if what you see is really there. This is the territory of the sweet and melancholic Japanese ghost- 'the trembling ghost of Yugao' as Gary Snyder put it- not the terrifying destructive one. (Terrifying Japanese ghosts are for summer, when stories of their horrific antics send a chill down your spine and so cool you off in the heat. No, I'm serious. That's what summer ghost stories are for in Asia. In these latter degenerate days, the popular magazines run stories of body parts found at sea, with photos, to serve the same purpose. No I'm not kidding. I saw them.) Sweet Japanese ghosts are kept here by some attachment to the earth- a love unrequited, a lingering regret, something that didn't happen which should have. Noh drama is all about ghosts like these. They make for sweetly melancholic stories.

So here we have an antique store, the rain and willow shop, run by a grandfather and his grandson. Grandfather is a man of business, and grandson is a dark-eyed bishounen with soft unfocussed eyes who... sees things. No surprise in a place that deals with the objects of the past. 'Antique Shop of Horrors,' sort of. Well no, it's not, but reading this the same weekend as watching Petshop of Horrors was an interesting exercise in juxtaposition. I don't think either work lost by the comparison.

We're in the 1890's more or less, which is a good time for lingering regrets in Japan. From our point of view, it's that lost and nostalgic world of Meiji that gave Japan so much of its great literature- a period long ago and far away and very dear for that reason. For the people of the time, there's a little too much past that's all happened a little too recently. The violent, unlaid ghost of the Bakumatsu period backgrounds the bustling modern action. The class system is still in place, based on wealth now but keeping lovers apart as much as it did Edo period courtesans and their merchant boyfriends, and still leading to suicide at times. There are hints of continuing unrest in the form of violent men from obscure associations- anarchists, terrorists- who erupt into the action and then leave just as abruptly. They represent the dark political side of the 1890's, when assassination was a chronic danger in both Japan and the West, in an atmosphere as irrational as that caused by the terrorists today. That outside darkness, formless and menacing in the manga, threatens the personal human-relations world of the stories.

But in that personal world there's a lovely conceit. It's not just people who have lingering regrets and attachments. Things do too. Occasionally it happens that an object in the antique store is alive, animated by its feelings for a previous owner as often as by its previous owner's feelings for it. There's a scroll we see in passing called 'Sparrow in Bamboo,' which confuses a client because there's no sparrow in it. We find out later, equally in passing, that the sparrow flew away from its picture. There's a lovely story about a dog that belonged to the boy lord of a clan and died for its master. Master memorialized it as I won't tell you what (highlight to find out: a metal hotwater bottle, shaped like a sleeping dog, to keep the boy warm on cold nights like the dog did) before he died in his turn. But even today the I-won't-tell-you-what occasionally turns back into a dog and goes looking for its young master. Grandfather and grandson treat this as a mild nuisance, like any runaway dog. "Oh drat, he got out again. Go look for him."

In the action of a Noh play, a traveling monk comes to a place where something happened in history. A ghost from that time appears to him, here where it experienced the traumatic emotion that keeps it bound to the earth. The ghost relives the event and the emotion before the monk's witnessing eyes. And having done that- having been seen by someone capable of seeing it and heard by someone capable of hearing its story- the ghost achieves freedom and can leave the events of the past. Our young man is much like the traveling monk, if a little more active. (After all, someone has to physically take the object to the place or person it wants to be with.) But those dreamy eyes of his, which see visitors to the store invisible to the flesh-and-blood customers, are also capable of releasing both people and objects from the longing which binds them and giving them the requital they desire.

(Afternote: Gary Snyder, the American poet, is definitely worth looking up:

A Spring Night in Shokoku-ji
Eight years ago this May
We walked under cherry blossoms
At night in an orchard in Oregon.
All that I wanted then
Is forgotten now, but you.
Here in the night
In a garden of the old capital
I feel the trembling ghost of Yugao
I remember your cool body
Naked under a summer cotton dress.)