Week 3: J-Horror

I love Japanese folklore and folktales so I read all of Kwaidan for this week. I really enjoyed talking about the concept in class where humans and spirits live amongst each other but there is no good nor evil. Things are dangerous and sometimes you just don’t survive the encounters.  The Yokai, whether they are demons or spirits, are there to trouble or help you not destroy you. In this world we coexist with the spirit world but it seems there is more of a fault in humans.

My favorite stories were Jinkiniki, Yuki-Onna and Rokuro-Kubi. They conveyed this concept because they taught you that things can be dangerous and you have to be careful what you do or say. There were bad spirits but they weren’t technically out to get you.

This is also present in Hayoa Miyaziki’s Spirited Away and Nickelodeons’ The Legend of Korra, which are Japanese folklore inspired. Spirited away is about a young girl who finds herself trapped in the spirit world. There are several characters that seem to be evil but none of them technically are.  There is a gluttonous faceless demon, a terrifying witch, and even a dragon that all kind of present themselves as bad but they are far from it. Chihiro (the main character) runs into conflicts with the characters but they do not harm her but more or less trouble her but they all help her out in the end.

In the recent season of The Legend of Korra, a new popular American Anime, there is a conflict with spirits entering the human world. There are two spirits combined at the tails called Rava, the spirit of peace and light, and Vaatu, the spirit of darkness and chaos, that spend their entire existence combating each other where neither are able to destroy the other.

Even if one were to destroy the other, they would still be born and start the cycle all over again. When one is destroyed there is either more light or darkness in the world causing a great imbalance. I feel like that is what the Kwaidan stories are all about. They’re about keeping things in balance and continuing the cycle of light and dark.

What makes these stories different from most Western horror is not only that they are more culture based but because they are more about lessons then about a hero destroying a villain. Because Korra is an American cartoon, it has that central evil that must be defeated. Our stories always seem to have that whereas the stories from Kwaidan are more about resonance.