Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/291

 Reviews. 251

and takes to the rightful heir a treasured sword, and the ghost of a wife dead in the snow returns in a snowstorm to remonstrate with her husband when he forsakes his father-in-law. Specially interesting are the several accounts of the shito da?na, — red or smoky-white fireballs either "roundish oblong tadpole shape or square-fronted eyed shape," — which are taken by the author to be the astral form assumed by a spirit which desires to wander over the earth after death. In one case a red shito dania — "The Spider Fire of the Spirit of the Dead Akechi," — comes in bad weather to wreak vengeance on the fishermen of Lake Biwa, one of whom had betrayed Akechi's castle to besiegers. In the gruesome story of "A Haunted Temple in Inaba Province," a murdered priest appears at one and the same time as both a buzzing shito dania and a luminous skeleton with glaring eyes, although the two apparitions seem able to coalesce. The priest who sees this double apparition, and dies of fright, believes in the shito dania, but not in ghosts. (In other collections than this the shito dama is described as a blue flame.)

The ghosts are often associated with trees. The ghost of the priest Yenoki, who loses the sight of one eye by peering into the shrine he guards, resides in a great cryptomeria ; the spirit of the caretaker who disembowels himself because he cannot prevent the cutting down of his beloved camphor-tree enters into the fallen tree, which then cannot be removed and lives on ; and the ghost of a retainer who disembowels himself to be free to rebuke his lord appears annually in the cherry-tree growing from his grave. But we meet with the ghosts or spirits of trees and plants as well as of human beings. The author tells us (p. 302) that "the Japanese say that ghosts in inanimate nature generally have more liveliness than ghosts of the dead," and in these stories we meet spirits of the cherry, willow, and plum trees, and of the lotus lily, peony, and chrysanthemum, who avenge injuries, die with or marry their preservers, and serve the families to which they are attached.

Deities and supernatural beings other than ghosts and vegeta- tion spirits appear somewhat rarely. In "The Perpetual Life- Giving Wine," a mountain goddess bestows the sake of perpetual youth, which is also given, in another story, by the scarlet haired