I’m a ghost and so are you
By Jane McBride
Photography by Mide Dineen. Model: Megan Carey
I'm not scared
Of myself ‘cause I'm not there
But it's not fair
I can see you when you're naked
(Telepopmusik, Ghost Girl)
Early in The Tale of Genji (I’m referencing the Royall Tyler translation here), young Genji lies in bed with yet another beautiful court lady. He wakes in the night to see a ghost, hovering over the two lovers. Then it’s gone.
A subtle moment. The ghost doesn’t do anything, and disappears as soon as it’s seen. But Genji is still afraid.
An intimate scene, interrupted by a ghost. Another event in Genji’s long life story. The Tale of Genji is a highly stylised portrayal of court life in Heian Japan, but it’s not a fairy tale. The ghost is scary and otherworldly, but it isn’t presented as anything fantastical. Genji’s immediate response to this ghost encounter is to go through the proper religious motions so it won’t cause him any problems.
Of course, we can never read a ghost as just a ghost. Even back when most people believed in ghosts, they weren’t included in fiction only as supernatural events. Genji’s life, like anyone’s, is full of sadness and missteps, and the apparition he sees feels like a culmination of all those figurative ghosts of his life.
Just when I think I'm winning
When I've broken every door
The ghosts of my life blow wilder than before
Just when I thought I could not be stopped
When my chance came to be king
The ghosts of my life blew wilder than the wind
(Japan, Ghosts)
I’m almost one year into my PhD research on liminality in urban and digital contexts. (Trying to explain it is always a mouthful, sorry.) And obviously I’ll have to touch on ghosts, because of all human concepts, they’re one of the most liminal. The thing is, I won’t be looking at ghosts in terms of folklore or horror fiction, or even ghosts in a direct, literal sense. I’m more interested in the idea of ghosts, as something we use to explain what haunts us. Being haunted is a vague thing; it’s not a tangible problem, or even an illness. It’s a close relative to nostalgia. So ghosts, especially in modern times, when we know they aren’t real, are a useful way to depict that vagueness, like moisture forming mist.
There are other mythic beings we can use like this, and most of them are liminal in some way. Nymphs and fairies are especially ephemeral, but there’s something unique about ghosts that make them particularly effective as metaphors or symbols. Ghosts used to be human. A nymph or fairy may exist between the physical world and some astral plane, but they don’t have that human connection, that sense of something missing or returning. I imagine that’s why ghosts are such a universal, enduring idea. The First Ghosts by Irving Finkel shows that depictions and descriptions of ghosts go back as far as ancient Mesopotamia, and I’m sure that even older peoples also imagined ghosts, even if they never wrote about or drew them.
In the 2017 film A Ghost Story, C’s ghost form is hidden under a white sheet. Simple and recognisable. For many, that image is the pure symbol of a ghost, to the point that using it in a serious adult film is actually surprising. The white sheet has become such a shorthand for ghosts (for so long we barely think about why) that they’re mostly seen in cartoons or costumes. So the way it’s used in A Ghost Story is disarming, even a little comical at first glance. But that’s what a ghost is. Just the idea of something, still hanging around. The idea of a person, even. A person whose face you may forget, until it’s just a simple shape.
Ghosts are between life and death. Spooky and sad. Funnily enough, the movie that first made me realise their complexity was Casper, the 1995 Harvey Comics adaptation. It’s weirdly uneven in how its different aspects don’t meld or match. There’s a surprising amount of effort put into some of the writing, to the point that the comedic moments feel jarringly out of place. Casper’s wacky uncles are often pushed aside in favour of something more poignant. There was no need to make Casper a movie about memory or loss, but someone did that anyway, and I’m glad. (I’d love to interview whoever that was.)
In Casper, Christina Ricci plays Kat, the daughter of a ghost hunter. Why does her dad, James Harvey, hunt ghosts? Because his wife, Kat’s mother, is dead. If he can find ghosts, then there’s the hope of contacting her ghost. He is haunted by her memory, and turns that into an obsession with more literal hauntings. Kat’s perspective is more cynical. Ricci’s sullen eyes and subdued voice make Kat seem grounded, nearly a real person, which again is jarring in contrast with the cartoon ghosts. By the end, even some of those ghosts become more human, but not the trio of uncles — they remain cartoons. Casper, however, gradually remembers his past, who he used to be (here, being a ghost comes with amnesia), and he reveals to Kat his cause of death. He froze. It’s only looking back that I see how strange this moment is for a children’s film. It reminds me of that Simpsons scene where the kids are wondering if Casper is the ghost of a suicidal Richie Rich. This strangeness isn’t bad. I’m grateful for these details that made what could have been something disposable into something worth remembering.
And it doesn’t stop there. It turns out that Casper’s grieving dad invented a machine named Lazarus in a desperate attempt to revive his son. When he and Kat find the machine, he is excited to become a real boy again. But he has to give up that chance, as there’s only enough power to use it once, and Casper’s uncles have killed James. They’ve turned him into a goofy ghost, free of all his sad human memories. The uncles are somehow not the villains, and are portrayed as more misguidedly trying to help James by killing him. After Kat tearfully reminds her dad of who he was, Casper allows James to be revived in his place, knowing that as much as he loves his human friend, she needs her dad.
The phrase ‘unfinished business’ is repeated throughout. James could never find his wife’s ghost because her time alive with him and Kat was happy and loving, and so she accepted death, passing on to the other side. Although, she does briefly appear to explain this at the very end, but not in cartoon ghost form — she is played with warmth by Amy Brenneman — and allows Casper a Cinderella moment, to dance with Kat as a human boy until ten p.m. Everyone has unfinished business. They’re the ghosts of our life. Not just things that were left unresolved, but also more simple feelings, like longing. In fiction, ghosts have unfinished business. In reality, ghosts are unfinished business.
In the Kenzaburo Oe short story Aghwhee the Sky Monster (translated by John Nathan), a man is visited by the apparition of a floating, kangaroo-sized baby after the death of his son. It contains that same longing found in Casper, only this time taking an adult’s point of view. The sadness doesn’t come from a dead child remembering his life and wanting to be human again; it comes from a parent who can’t let his dead son go, a son whose spirit keeps appearing to him as something warped.
Poor little ghost boy
I'll give to you my heart
We'll find the little ghost girl
They drowned in the bath
(Ruby Throat, Ghost Boy)
A Hungry Ghost can never get enough sustenance. It is being punished for a lifetime of greed. I often feel like a Hungry Ghost. I wish I could be one of those more graceful ghosts, the kind that looks like a vague mist, but I can’t kid myself. I’m an ugly, pathetic, Hungry Ghost, always desperate for more. And I deserve to be one, because I’m horrible. My unfinished business is my fault.
No blood is spilled in
The land of lost children
But it is friendless
Empty and endless
She was neglected
But no one expected
She'd hold her breath for
Ever and ever
(The Residents, Ghost Child)
Anything human-made can be imbued with ghostliness. Houses, hotels, video tapes, phones, computers, the internet… In fiction, they’ve all been haunted. In Horror in Architecture, Ong Ker-Shing and Joshua Comaroff draw similarities between haunted houses and haunted technology. The latter is also explored in-depth by Jeffrey Sconce in Haunted Media.
In House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, the house itself becomes a kind of ghost. Not just one house, but the idea of a house, as shown by the photos of many different houses found in the appendices. Leanne Shapton’s Guestbook takes this idea and fragments it in a series of stories that are more like collages, where the ghosts are almost always out of sight, haunting photo albums and scripts, like found footage in print form. And as The Blair Witch Project and the many born-digital horror stories about lost TV series show, found footage and other forms of media can haunt us with the same nostalgia houses use.
Ghosts are peripheral. They stand out of reach, almost out of sight, like the spirits in the Kiyoshi Kurosawa film Pulse. Ghosts can pass through almost anything, like the eerie ghost girl Sadako coming out through a TV screen in the Ring series of books and films. They can stand at your bed, like Genji’s ghost, or the ghost of Miss Saeki’s past self from Kafka on the Shore (translated by Philip Gabriel).
There are so many more instances of ghosts in fiction that I want to reference here, but the problem is I can’t remember where they’re all from. My memories are there, but peripheral.
There is a place around the corner
Where your dead friends live
(Einstürzende Neubauten, Dead Friends)
Recently, Taichi Yamada’s Strangers (translated by Wayne P. Lammers) was adapted into a film by Andrew Haigh. I had one of those peripheral memory moments when hearing about that film online. “Oh, that sounds familiar,” I thought. It was familiar because I’d read the book years ago, along with two other Yamada novels I’d found at random, and barely remembered what happened until news of the film jogged my memory. All of a sudden, I remembered how the narrator found his late parents, seemingly still living in an old neighbourhood, like the one from his childhood. Of course, they’re ghosts, and for his own safety, he has to stop seeing them.
It brings to mind manga collective CLAMP’s series xxxHolic, where the witch Yūko ultimately turns out to have been a ghost, guiding the young Watanuki to take her place, and leaving him to take care of her mystical gift shop. She was the ghost of someone he’d never known. A tearful Watanuki cannot accept her being gone, and decides to stay in the shop, unageing, until he can someday see her again.
I think I should give up the ghost (don't hurt me, don't hurt me)
In your arms (don't hurt me, don't hurt me)
(Radiohead, Give Up the Ghost)
What about a happy ghost? A ghost that isn’t kept in place by loss or mourning, but by traces of gentler memories. That’s the kind of ghost you’ll find in Kidkanevil’s My Little Ghost. Released in 2014 by Project Mooncircle, it instantly became my all-time favourite album, and ten years later its place still hasn’t been shifted. Kidkanevil’s soft glitches and wavy synths sound like an unlikely melding of Autechre and Lullatone. It’s a little bittersweet at times, but mostly sweet. Kotaro Chiba’s album art shows a ghost girl in a simple sundress, standing in an empty cityscape and floating in the room of an apartment, equally empty except for a telephone pole growing from the floor. Chiba’s delicate, slightly eerie illustrations capture the strange mood of the music.
The album tells a wordless story of this ghost girl passing through an imaginary city dubbed Tokyorkshire. It opens with All Is Lost, a gloomily pretty ambient track that sounds like a ghost being born. And it ends with All Is Not Lost, as all the gloom seems to have been lifted, and that same ghost is free to explore her city forever. As the liner notes explain, “[w]hat’s left is nothing more than the ghost of a young soul, wandering about and curiously studying the surrounding, forever looking for answers that would otherwise seem trivial.”
