Ikiryō

Also Known As: 生霊; archaic ikisudama; also written ikirei
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: The soul of a living person leaves the body, usually in sleep or in bitter distraction, and travels to sicken, torment or kill whoever its owner cannot stop thinking about.
Role in Mythos: It is the living counterpart of the ghost, the spirit that haunts before its owner has died, and in Heian literature it is the most feared and least manageable of the possessing spirits.
Relation to Humans: The ikiryō attacks the rival, the faithless lover, the neglectful husband, and its owner is often the last to know what her own soul has been doing at night. Court doctors and monks treated it as an illness with a culprit, and the whole apparatus of Heian exorcism was built to drag it into the open and make it say its name.

The room smells of burning poppy seed. A woman lies on a low couch in a pure white robe with her long hair unfastened, and around her the chanting has been going on for days, priests of the greater school and the secret school, mantras, sutras, bells. The other spirits have already come out. Each was coaxed into the body of a young medium kneeling beside the curtains, each shuddered, spoke, gave its name, and was dismissed. One will not go. It will not enter the girl. It stays where it is, in the pregnant woman on the bed, and everyone in the room understands what that means, because there is only one kind of spirit that cannot be moved.

The Japanese called it an ikiryō, a living spirit. Not the ghost of someone dead, which is a shiryō, and which the priests could handle. This is the soul of a person still breathing, still eating, still writing letters somewhere across the city, and it has come here without her.

The great case is in the Tale of Genji, written around the year 1004, and it destroys two women rather than one. Genji has a lover, the Lady of Rokujō, a widow of high birth and higher pride, whose position has slipped and whose lover no longer comes. He takes another woman to a deserted mansion for the night. A figure appears at the bedside and cries out that she has found him, and asks what stranger this is who lies beside him, and stoops as if to drag the sleeping girl away. Before dawn the girl is dead. Nothing else in the room has moved.

The second death is slower and better documented. At the Kamo festival, the carriages of Genji’s wife Aoi and the Lady of Rokujō are wedged together in the crowd on Ichijō avenue, and Aoi’s servants, who have been drinking, shove the other carriage back out of the good position and break its poles. Rokujō, incognito behind her blinds, sits in the wreckage of her own vehicle and cannot even leave. Genji rides past in the procession and salutes the wife. Not long after this, Aoi falls ill.

What follows is the most exact account of possession in classical Japanese literature, and its subject is not really the victim. It is Rokujō, at home, doing nothing. She hears that Aoi is suffering, and feels a little sorry for her. She hears that the cause is a living spirit, and feels something worse. Then the dreams start: she flies to a beautiful girl and struggles with her, tears at her, and wakes. The dreams come often. She thinks with dread of what people will say. She becomes listless and depressed, and Murasaki’s translator, describing the belief a thousand years later, gets it exactly right: the owner of such a spirit is not aware of it, but goes about like a woman who has lost her own soul, which is precisely what has happened to her.

The exorcism at Aoi’s bedside is where the two women finally meet. The spirit speaks through the sick woman and asks only for a little rest. It says that the thoughts of a distracted person wander away without their owner’s knowledge, and then it asks Genji to bind its wandering soul and keep it from straying. The voice is not Aoi’s. It belongs to Rokujō, and when Genji leans closer, Aoi’s face for a moment is Rokujō’s face. Aoi delivers her son, seems to recover, and dies in a spasm one evening while the household is away at court.

The most terrible detail comes afterwards. Rokujō, hearing that the child is safely born, feels the old jealousy stir again, and then notices that her clothes carry a strange smell. She bathes. She changes. The smell comes back. It is the scent of the poppy seed burned in the exorcism rites at a house she has never entered, and it is in her hair.

She never once decided to do it.

The Heian court had a whole machinery for this, and it is worth knowing what it was, because the ikiryō is defined by the one thing that machinery could not do. A diviner established that the illness came from a mono no ke, a possessing thing. An exorcist arrived with a medium, often a girl of the household, and knelt beside the patient with a rosary and a small ritual thunderbolt of gilt bronze. He chanted until the spirit was driven out of the sick body and into the medium’s, where it was bound, made to tremble and wail and speak in a voice not her own, interrogated, humiliated, and finally made to beg forgiveness before it was let go. The whole thing turned on names. A spirit that gives its name loses its grip. The living spirit refuses to be transferred, refuses the medium, refuses to be named, and stays.

Three centuries later the Noh theatre put Rokujō on stage in the play Aoi no Ue, and the stagecraft is an argument in itself. A blind sorceress plucks a catalpa bowstring to make the invisible visible and to determine whether the spirit tormenting the princess belongs to a living person or a dead one. Rokujō comes on in her broken carriage, wretched and ashamed, saying that she is no more than the mist over the fields. She sings about the wheel of the ox-cart going round and round until vengeance comes. Then she says, twice, that she must strike, and she strikes the pillow. She goes to the back of the stage, throws off her embroidered robe, exchanges her mask for the horned face of a female demon, and returns with a mallet in her hand. A mountain ascetic drives her off with the Hannya sutra, and the last thing she says is that she will never come as an angry ghost again.

Its powers follow from what it is. The ikiryō goes where the body cannot and while the body sleeps; it carries the full weight of a grudge that its owner has been too well bred to speak aloud; it can sicken, madden and kill; it can be seen, at the worst moment, wearing the face of a woman who is at that moment sitting quietly at home. Its limits follow from the same source. It cannot be aimed. It shames its owner, who is disgraced by it in public and in her own mirror. It can be recognised, and recognition is what breaks it, which is why the mediums and the naming and the bowstring existed at all. And it can be prayed away, though the sutra that ends the play does not resurrect anyone. Aoi is already dead, Rokujō is already ruined, and the spirit that did it went home each night to a woman who could not remember leaving.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an ikiryō?

An ikiryō is the spirit of a living person that leaves the body and haunts, sickens or kills someone else. It is distinguished in Japanese belief from the shiryō, the spirit of a person who has already died. In the classical accounts it is driven by jealousy, resentment or obsessive attachment, and it usually acts without its owner’s conscious knowledge.

Who is the most famous ikiryō in Japanese literature?

The Lady of Rokujō in Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji, written around 1004. Her living spirit kills Genji’s lover Yūgao and then his pregnant wife Aoi, after Aoi’s servants humiliate her in a fight over carriage positions at the Kamo festival. Rokujō learns what her own soul has been doing only from her dreams and from the smell of exorcism incense clinging to her hair.

How is an ikiryō different from a yūrei?

A yūrei is the ghost of a dead person; an ikiryō belongs to someone still alive. Heian exorcists considered the living spirit the more dangerous of the two, because a dead spirit could be argued with, named and sent back to the grave, while a living one still had a body and a life to return to and could not be dismissed for good.

How was an ikiryō exorcised?

An exorcist monk would attempt to drive the spirit out of the sick person and into a medium, usually a young woman or child, who would then tremble, speak in the spirit’s voice, and be made to reveal its identity, since a spirit that gives its name loses its power. In the Genji, the living spirit possessing Aoi refuses to be transferred to the medium at all, which is how the household knows what kind of spirit it is dealing with.

What does an ikiryō look like?

The old sources give it no body of its own. In the Tale of Genji it shows itself only in the possessed woman’s voice and in her face briefly resembling the woman whose spirit it is, and in the Noh play Aoi no Ue it is staged with the horned mask of a female demon and a mallet, which is theatre giving a shape to something the literature deliberately left invisible.