Besides being the place where the majority of your consumer electronics originate, Japan’s biggest export is of absolutely pant-wettingly terrifying ghost stories. The likes of The Ring and The Grudge, films remade to lesser effect in English, follow the tradition of kaidan – literally “talk [of] strange, mysterious, rare or bewitching apparitions” – which date back to the Edo period. And they are all equally as bizarre, disturbing and gross as the hauntings of Sadako and Kayako.
One such story is Botan Dōrō, which translates roughly to The Peony Lantern, one of the most famous kaidan. It began as a moralistic Buddhist parable about karma that came from China, but was retrofitted into being more straight-up scary by an enterprising author Asai Ryōi, and spread in popularity thanks to his translation and later kabuki adaptations. And of course it was a hit – after all, it featured necrophilia!
Sort of, anyway. The basic story of Botan Dōrō is of a beautiful woman and a young girl holding a lantern the house of a widowed samurai. The samurai is instantly smitten with the woman and, from that night on, both her and the girl visit the house during dusk and disappear before dawn. A suspicious elderly neighbour peeks into the house one night and sees the samurai in bed with a skeleton. Unable to resist her charms, even when he finds out what’s happening, the samurai is lead by the woman into the local graveyard, where his body is found buried alive, again spooning the skeleton
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