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Kristine Ohkubo
Sep 2, 20222 min read

Sanyutei Encho's “Botan Doro” (“The Peony Lantern”)

An Excerpt from "Talking About Rakugo 1: The Japanese Art of Storytelling


The Japanese love telling ghost stories during the hot summer months, we Americans love ghost stories as we approach Halloween.


Sanyutei Encho, the master rakugo storyteller, opened up new possibilities for traditional Japanese storytelling and gained popularity for his original ghost stories and stories adapted from foreign literary works.


One of the most noteworthy of Encho’s stories was “Botan Doro” (“The Peony Lantern”), which he adapted into rakugo in 1884.


The original “Botan Doro” appeared in a compilation of ghost stories called Jiandeng Xinhua (New Tales Under the Lamplight) by Chinese novelist Qu You. The story entered the Japanese literary culture in 1666 after it was translated into Japanese by the Buddhist monk and author Asai Ryoi (circa 1612-1691). Ryoi, regarded as one of the finest writers of kanazoshi (a form of popular literature written with little or no kanji making it accessible to common people), incorporated the story along with Qu You’s other stories into his own vastly popular book called Otogi Boko (Hand Puppets).


In Ryoi’s version, a beautiful woman named Otsuyu and a young girl holding a peony lantern stroll by the house of a widowed samurai on the first night of Obon (the Japanese Buddhist tradition of honoring the spirits of one's ancestors). The samurai is instantly smitten with the woman and vows his eternal love to her. From that night onward, the woman and the girl visit the samurai’s house daily at dusk, always leaving before dawn.


An elderly neighbor grows suspicious about the mysterious visitors and spies through the bedroom door one evening. He almost faints when he discovers the samurai entwined in the arms of a skeleton. He reports the incident to a Buddhist priest, who convinces the samurai that he is in grave danger.


Afterwards, they place a protection charm on the house that prevents the woman and the girl from entering. The woman continues to come to the house each night and beckons her lover from outside. Unable to resist her charms, the samurai goes out to greet her and is led back to her house, a grave at a temple. When morning arrives, the samurai's dead body is found entwined with the woman's skeleton.


In the rakugo version, which was published as a stenographically transcribed story in 1886, a young man named Hagiwara Shinzaburo falls in love with the spirit of a beautiful young woman. Encho’s adaptation was particularly frightening because as he told the story, he used wooden clogs to imitate the footsteps of the beautiful ghost. The audience found this extremely disturbing because it was commonly believed that Japanese ghosts did not have legs. But by choosing to portray the ghost in this manner, Encho acknowledged that the source of the story was China and not Japan.





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