In an email interview with WIRED, Yoda explains the long tradition of how yokai and Japanese ghost stories are told. One of the most important aspects, when it comes to GhostwireIts unique tone is the difference between a yokai and a yurei. While the two terms are often blurred together in popular culture as “yokai”, she describes those spirits as alluding to “a anything else“While referencing yurei” a who. ”
While yurei are “closely connected with the afterlife” and “usually manifest when someone is horribly mistreated and unjustly dies,” seeking revenge “or simply making everyone people who know their suffering,” yokai, are representative of all sorts of “phenomenons from catastrophes to strange sounds to even simple things like feeling a brush brush against your foot when nothing is there.” That is, ‘usually not ‘dangerous phenomena as much as the things that frighten or surprise you’. They can, like Ghostwire itself, sad, happy, or, perhaps most interestingly, used as a means of social commentary.
The final aspect of yokai storytelling is shown right in the game. A story in one Ghostwire Text diaries feature headless ghosts in school uniforms whining about the number of followers from beyond the grave and being exorcised when their social media accounts are spied on. The Noppera-Bo-reminiscent guests that make up the game’s enemies are all depicted in Ghostwirecodex’s as embodiment of different normal struggles. Faceless women in customer service uniforms are “born from a life devoted to maintaining a cool appearance, empty smiles at the ready.” Now, they “radiate the very negative energy they are forced to endure.” The men in business suits were “born from the hearts of those driven to the point of exhaustion by their work”, while the other yurei embody “the pessimism nourished by existence.” emptiness” or “feelings of resignation for those with unfulfilled desires. ” Kenji Kimura calls these “evil spirit” descriptions of the “very strong negative emotions we feel as we, as humans, enter new, different phases each other in life.”
Far from a new way of thinking about ghosts, yurei stories “can be seen as a kind of moral instruction: Don’t mistreat others in this way,” Yoda explains. Yokai, on the other hand, is often “morally instructive,” used as a bogeyman that, in an example both she and Masato Kimura mention, keeps children from playing near water by describing the possibility Abstract Drowning Ability is a water yokai with terrifying abilities like Kappa. Yoda refers to the subcategory of Tsukumogami yokai is another example of this type of social instruction. Tsukomogami consists of everyday objects “that were carelessly discarded” before returning as animation tools “that got enraged and began to march around indignantly.” This “primitive satire of consumer culture” appears in Ghostwire adopts what is perhaps the most famous description of Tsukumogami: a long, zigzag umbrella called a yokai Karakasa Kozo.
Noriko Tsunoda Reider, professor of Japanese at the University of Miami and author of books including Japan Demon Lore: Oni from ancient times to present and more recently Mountain Witch: Yamauba, wrote in an email interview with WIRED that “concepts of right and wrong affect yokai characters of all types and dimensions,” especially in the way that they “often reflect Buddhist teachings.” at that time,” as “karma and samsara”. Reider also mentioned Tsukumogami, which was used not only to discuss consumer culture but also to “criticize other religious sects at the time.” She points to the “strong social commentary on power, money, loyalty, and the treatment of women” contained in the play. Yotsuya’s Ghost Story and the “fierce satire” of early 20th-century Japanese society written in the folklore framed novel by Ryunosuke Akutagawa Kappa also.
Framework for GhostwireIts plot is also reminiscent of a spiritual scar in recent Tokyo history. The game’s deadly smog wave, viewed from a specific cultural point of view, is eerily reminiscent of the 1995 subway sarin gas attack led by the Aum Shinrikyo cult, as GhostwireHannya, the mastermind of terror, preached the radical, militaristic destruction of the body in order to achieve spiritual enlightenment. (Far from a forgotten tragedy, a terrorist attack involving Aleph, the embodiment of Aum Shinrikyo, happened in 2019.)
Recalling yokai as part of apocalyptic events is not unprecedented. Yoda mentions that “yokai often manifest at difficult times to help people deal with the things they are struggling with.” She mentioned a trend on Twitter showing a 19th century “plague”, called Amabie was reset, thanks to an account that mentioned it in connection with an 1846 paper. In the article it is claimed that Amabie had risen from the ocean and asked to be drawn and shown to everyone if the epidemic was to happen. incurred. The Covid-19 pandemic saw Amabie circulate and be relevant in modern times, Yoda writes, “some sort of guardian angel or symbolic amulet figure of the pandemic, protecting people from disease, or [controlling] pandemic and [making] it disappears. ” Although Yoda writes that “no one in Japan believes that this silly drawing will actually solve the current pandemic,” it has been used by the nation — and its government — as something that can help. can help make an event as amorphous and terrifying as a pandemic feel a little more manageable .
