Let's take a look here, just to give you a more concrete
sort of image of what these books might have been like.
Here is an example of an instruction book for people who want to be fortune tellers
or a sort of sample of ways to use the I Ching, the sticks and
the patterns that they make once you've chosen them to tell people's fortunes.
This was published in the west of Japan in 1703.
But there are a lot of different commentaries and illustrated books,
actually manuals to show you how to tell people's fortunes using the I Ching.
I imagine Nakagawa having tons and tons of these books,
books that were published decades before he was alive, and
putting them all together, collating them, thinking of them, thinking about them and
writing sort of assiduously into the margins above and below.
And you can see that there's lots of white space in these old Japanese
books that you can actually sort of write things into.
Anyway, he's gone off to the netherworld, left all of them behind and
his books have scattered, basically, to the wind.
The story goes on, "It didn't take long for
Nakagawa's ghost to appear everyday at Mr Kokuzan's row house.
Kokuzan couldn't fathom why, so he asked the ghost,
in great deference, his reasons for showing up in such wretched form.
To which Nakagawa replied, 'for years, I studied under your tutelage,
concentrating on these fortune telling books,
until I was able to come upon ideas unknown to the ancients.
I wrote eagerly into the books I owned, guarding them as my treasures.
But as fate demands, my life came to an end and I've passed into the beyond.
My faithless wife, though, stupidly sold off all the books I'd worked so
hard on and cherished, then remarried to boot.'"
He's less concerned and angry about the fact that she remarried,
she's free to remarry, it was true in the 19th century,
the 18th century in Japan as it is today, than the fact that she
didn't keep all of his books together and perhaps give them to his teacher or
another disciple who was perhaps a little bit younger than him.
In other words, she released everything and invalidated all of the work and
the passion that he poured into his studies and into these words.
So he has not been able to ascend into Buddhist paradise,
he's stuck in the world as this frustrated ghost.
He comes back and
sort of tells his teacher he wants to know why, why did this happen.
So anyway, this Mr Kokuzan, who owns a house where he rents some of the rooms and
one of the rooms was rented to Nakagawa, is kind of stuck in this hard position.
He has to sort of negotiate with this ghost and try to quell him, make him
feel a little more sort of comfortable so that he can go off to rest for eternity.
But Nakagawa is extremely angry. "'Overcome with resentment,
I slaughtered both of them two or three days ago.
On top of this, the fellow who bought my inscribed I Ching texts has been spreading
around the best part of my work as if it were his own,
while treating the weaker parts like they were dirt.
Totally unbearable, I let my anger loose and decided to slaughter him too -
everyday since I've been beating him up, making his life miserable.
The reason I came back in this form is because I want you to retrieve all my
I Ching texts for me.'"
At this point, I imagine merchant men or
women in Edo in the 1830s listening to this story,
this story is probably rather than being read individually by a lot of people,
it was sort of orally transmitted, we can assume.
I can imagine them sort of thinking, Gosh, this is a ghost story.
What's going to happen?
He's taking his revenge, it's a vendetta tale,
most vendetta tales in the Edo period in Japan have to do with samurai honor,
and you take revenge on someone for sullying the name of your domain or
your house or your Lord or so forth, in order to protect your pride.
Here, this man has come back from the beyond to
murder his wife, to take revenge on the fact that his work,
his life work has been dispersed and destroyed.
Anyway, the books have been sold to someone else,
who is basically plagiaring him.
And he's come back to his mentor Kokuzan to
try to get him to retrieve the books, to bring them back, to recover them.
